Structural change and reanalysis difficulty in language comprehension

Many theories of parsing predict that the difficulty of syntactic reanalysi s depends on the type of structural change involved. However, most existing experimental data show that reanalysis difficulty is affected by nonstruct ural factors like plausibility and verb bias, whereas claims about structur al change are typically based on intuition alone. We report two self-paced reading experiments which demonstrate clear differences in the magnitude of garden path effects associated with different types of structural change. However, difficulty of reanalysis was not affected by the position of the h ead noun within the ambiguous phrase. We interpret these results in terms o f theories of structural change such as Sturt and Crocker (1996). (C) 1999 Academic Press.