Referencing context in sentence processing: A failure to replicate the strong interactive mental models hypothesis

Immediate Processing of Sentences in Language Communication

“…In accordance with this preference, discontinuous constituents are difficult to process. Compare the sentence in (10)- (12) (Warren, 2013). The more elements that intervene between range and up, the more difficult it is to comprehend the sentence.…”

“…(11) Lily rang her friend in the Outer Hebrides up. (12) Lily rang her friend in the Outer Hebrides that she hadn't seen since their trip together to Japan the summer before last up.…”

“…So, in behavioral patterns in sentence comprehension, such as investigations of eye movements during reading, reading times during initial analysis should be primarily influenced by syntactic factors, as evidenced by the observed slowdown in reading when encountering a garden path sentence (Clifton et al, 2016). Non-syntactic factors, on the other hand, are expected to exert their influence during later stages of analysis, such as when readers engage in regression to revise their initial syntactic interpretation (Frazier & Rayner, 1982;Dempsey & Christianson, 2022). However, the latency of regressions is still determined by syntax, as it results from words that do not conform to the reader's initially preferred analysis.…”