PLAUSIBILITY AND RECOVERY FROM GARDEN PATHS - AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY

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.