Mj. Pickering et Mj. Traxler, PLAUSIBILITY AND RECOVERY FROM GARDEN PATHS - AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 24(4), 1998, pp. 940-961
Three eye-tracking experiments investigated plausibility effects on re
covery from misanalysis in sentence comprehension. On the initially fa
vored analysis, a noun phrase served as the object of the preceding ve
rb. On the ultimately correct analysis, it served as the subject of a
main clause in Experiments 1 and 3 and of a complement clause in Exper
iment 2. If the object analysis was implausible, disruption occurred d
uring processing of the noun phrase. If it was plausible, disruption o
ccurred after disambiguation. In Experiment 3, discourse context affec
ted plausibility of the initial analysis and subsequent reanalysis. Th
e authors argue that readers performed substantial semantic processing
on the initial analysis and committed strongly when it was plausible.
Experiment 3 showed that these effects were not due to selectional re
strictions or word co-occurrences and that the interpretation of the t
arget sentence was not computed in isolation.