EFFECTS OF SYNTAX IN HUMAN SENTENCE PARSING - EVIDENCE AGAINST A STRUCTURE-BASED PROPOSAL MECHANISM

In 1992, D.C. Mitchell, M.M.B. Corley, and A. Garnham presented new ev idence to suggest that contextual information does not influence the p arser's initial decisions. They suggested, however, that if sufficient material separates the choice point from the point of syntactic disam biguation, the processor may have sufficient time to revoke an initial structure-based decision in favor of a more contextually compatible a nalysis, and so avoid the garden path. They described a reading time e xperiment that they claim is incompatible with an initial context-base d decision. In the present article we argue that Mitchell et al.'s con texts were in fact ineffective. We describe an experiment based on a s ubset of the Mitchell et al. design, but with differently structured c ontexts, and present eye movement data that are compatible with the cl aim that contextual information can influence the parser's initial dec isions.