Younger and Older Adults' "Good-Enough" Interpretations of Garden-Path Sentences

Abstract

We report 3 experiments that examined younger and older adults' reliance on "good-enough" interpretations for garden-path sentences (e.g., "While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib") as indicated by their responding "Yes" to questions probing the initial, syntactically unlicensed interpretation (e.g., "Did Anna dress the baby?"). The manipulation of several factors expected to influence the probability of generating or maintaining the unlicensed interpretation resulted in 2 major age differences: Older adults were generally more likely to endorse the incorrect interpretation for sentences containing optionally transitive verbs (e.g., hunted, paid), and they showed decreased availability of the correct interpretation of subordinate clauses containing reflexive absolute transitive verbs (e.g., dress, bathe). These age differences may in part be linked to older adults' increased reliance on heuristic-like good-enough processing to compensate for age-related deficits in working memory capacity. The results support previous studies suggesting that syntactic reanalysis may not be an all-or-nothing process and might not be completed unless questions probing unresolved aspects of the sentence structure challenge the resultant interpretation.In a recent series of articles, Christianson, Ferreira, and colleagues (Christianson, 2002;Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001;Ferreira, 2003;Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002;Ferreira & Henderson, 1999) have presented evidence of shallow, or in their terms "good-enough" sentence processing. The overarching claim of this line of research is that on at least some occasions people may come away with interpretations of certain types of sentences that do not faithfully represent the true content of the sentences. In these articles, the authors point out that within the realm of cognitive psychology it is not controversial that mental representations of sensory information are often underspecified in some ways. For example, in the field of visual cognition, research has shown that viewers of a scene do not construct a veridical copy of that scene in their heads (Henderson & Hollingworth, 1999;Irwin, 1996;Simons & Levin, 1997). Likewise in the fields of judgment and decision-making (e.g., Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982) heuristic-based decisionmaking allows for fast and frugal integration of input with less expenditure of both cognitive resources and time. The results in both cases are usually adequate, but they are occasionally wrong in predictable and testable ways.Given that time, attention, and processing resources are limited in most real-world information processing tasks, including language, suspecting that the human sentence processor might be Correspondence should be addressed to Kiel Christianson, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois, Education Building, Room 226A, MC-708, 1310 S. 6th Street, Champaign, IL 61820. E-mail: kiel@uiuc.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDiscourse Process. Author manuscript; available i...

Catching the mind in flight: Using behavioral indices to detect mindless reading in real time

“…This result could help explain the deficit in encoding the lexical features of words, since frequent blinking is associated with deactivation of cortical areas that process the external visual world (Bristow, Haynes, Sylvester, Frith, & Rees, 2005). Consistent with these findings are results indicating that reading comprehension can be compromised when critical regions of the text are poorly encoded (Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2006;Sanford & Graesser, 2006;Stine-Morrow, Noh, & Shake, 2010). Together, these findings indicate that the negative impact of mindless reading is likely a consequence of participants' neglect of the visual, phonological, and semantic features of the words, which has been described as the "cascade model of inattention" (Smallwood, 2011).…”

Children and situation models of multiple events.

“…Comprehension questions have been found to be indicative of the correctness of the final interpretation created of the stories (see, e.g., Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2006, for comprehension questions that revealed incorrect interpretations of garden-path sentences with younger and older adults).…”

Age differences in tracking characters during narrative comprehension

“…Assuming that readers allocated sufficient resources to fully instantiate the new character, one would expect no effect of the character condition on probe response time. However, readers do not always fully specify text representations when processing demands are high (Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001;Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Ferreira, 2006;Smallwood, McSpadden, & Schooler, 2008;StineMorrow, Miller, & Hertzog, 2006), so we also considered the possibility that the existence of another character in the discourse world might also affect how thoroughly the new character was instantiated. In this case, one would also expect that, relative to baseline, probe recognition latencies would be greater in the different condition and smaller in the same condition.…”

“…Older readers overallocate processing time to instantiate the first character in a narrative, but may not completely keep up with the demands of multiple characters. As such, the lack of age differences in reading time in the different condition relative to the baseline suggests the possibility of underspecification of the situation by the older adults (Christianson et al, 2006).…”

“…In fact, a number of findings in recent years suggest that older readers may be especially susceptible to underspecification in language processing under some conditionsfor example, in reanalysis of syntactic analysis (Christianson et al, 2006), in integrating new concepts in sentence understanding (Shake, Noh, & Stine-Morrow, 2009;Stine, 1990), and among the older old, following narrative plot (Stine-Morrow, Miller, Gagne, & Hertzog, 2008). Furthermore, Daneman, Hannon, and Burton (2006) have demonstrated that older adults have to allocate more resources in order to detect an anomaly in the text to achieve a similar tion of a new character, it was not sufficient for encoding the character as thoroughly as the young adults did, and so the new character was less accessible when probed.…”