Can propositional biases modulate syntactic repair processes? Insights from preceding comprehension questions

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about whether discourse biases can constrain sentence processing. Previous work has shown comprehension question accuracy to decrease for temporarily ambiguous sentences preceded by a context biasing towards an initial misinterpretation, suggesting a role of context for modulating comprehension. However, this creates limited modulation of reading times at the disambiguating word, suggesting initial syntactic processing may be unaffected by context [Christianson & Luke, 2011. Context strengthens initial misinterpretations of text. Scientific Studies of Reading, 15(2), 136-166]. The current experiments examine whether propositional and structural content from preceding comprehension questions can cue readers to expect certain structures in temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences. The central finding is that syntactic repair processes remain unaffected while reading times in other regions are modulated by preceding questions. This suggests that reading strategies can be superficially influenced by preceding comprehension questions without impacting the fidelity of ultimate (mis)representations.

Absence of evidence for underspecification in prenominal relative clause attachment

“…Importantly, both accounts of Swets et al's findings, the underspecification account and the SMCM, must assume some mechanism by which task demands affect either the duration or the quality of some parsing operations, even in unambiguous sentences. While we are not aware of any independent evidence for an interaction between sentence complexity and task demands, it is in line with prior research demonstrating the influence of task demands on reading in general (Dempsey & Brehm, 2020;Kaakinen & Hyönä, 2010;Schotter, Bicknell, Howard, Levy, & Rayner, 2014;Weiss, Kretzschmar, Schlesewsky, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, & Staub, 2018;Wotschack & Kliegl, 2013).…”

Syntactic adaptation leads to updated knowledge for local structural frequencies

“…These explanations are backed up by the much lower overall accuracy for reduced relative ambiguities compared with “and” coordination ambiguities and by the dramatically lower accuracy for unambiguous conditions in Experiment 3 compared with Experiment 2. More work is needed to investigate the effect of question type on answering post-interpretive questions (Bader & Meng, 2018; Christianson & Luke, 2011; Dempsey & Brehm, 2020; Dempsey et al, 2022; Meng & Bader, 2021).…”

Processing noncanonical sentences: effects of context on online processing and (mis)interpretation

“…The relation between online and offline measures has received considerable attention in research on another type of misinterpretation effect: lingering misinterpretations in garden path sentences such as While Anna dressed the baby that was cute and cuddly played in the crib. The central finding obtained by studies combining online and offline measures is that misinterpretation effects -as measured by offline comprehension tasks -persist even when online measures provide clear signs of syntactic reanalysis, such as increased reading times in the disambiguating region of garden path sentences (Christianson et al, 2010;Dempsey & Brehm, 2020;Qian et al, 2018). Furthermore, comprehension accuracy was found to be independent from reading times in the disambiguating regions (Christianson & Luke, 2011;Chromý, 2021;Wonnacott et al, 2016).…”

“…Studies capitalizing on comprehenders' final interpretation have presented OS sentences out of context, which may have contributed to the high error rates observed for English OS cleft-sentences (Ferreira, 2003) and German OS main clauses (Bader & Meng, 2018;Meng & Bader, 2021). For garden-path sentences, context has been argued to strengthen misinterpretation effects if the initial analysis integrates well with the preceding context (Christianson & Luke, 2011;Dempsey & Brehm, 2020). If this also holds for the processing of unambiguous noncanonical OS sentences, misinterpretation effects should persist or become even stronger, as our manipulations of context and referential form license, but do not force, OS order and are also compatible with SO order.…”