Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger

In the literature dealing with the reanalysis of garden path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the wends, it is generally assum ed either that people completely repair their initial incorrect syntactic r epresentations to yield a final interpretation whose syntactic structure is fully consistent with the input string or that the parse fails. In a serie s of five experiments, we explored the possibility that partial reanalyses take place. Specifically, we examined the conditions under which part of th e initial incorrect analysis persists at the same time that part of the cor rect final analysis is constructed. In Experiments la and Ib, we found that both the length of the ambiguous region and the plausibility of the ultima te interpretation affected the likelihood that such sentences would be full y reanalyzed. In Experiment 2. we compared garden path sentences with non-g arden path sentences and compared performance on two different types of com prehension questions. In Experiments 3a and 3b, we constructed garden path sentences using a small class of syntactically unique verbs to provide conv erging evidence against the position that people employ some sort of "gener al reasoning" or pragmatic inference when faced with syntactically difficul t garden paths. The results from these experiments indicate that reanalysis of such sentences is not always complete, so that comprehenders often deri ve an interpretation for the full sentence in which part of the initial mis analysis persists. We conclude that the goal of language processing is not always to create an idealized structure, but rather to create a representat ion that is "good enough" to satisfy the comprehender that an appropriate i nterpretation has been obtained. (C) 2001 Academic Press.