READING PROCESSES DURING SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS AND REANALYSIS

We conducted two experiments to examine the processing of garden path sentences such as While the boy scratched the dog yawned loudly. We varied the ambiguous phrase of such sentences so that it was either short (the dog), long due to the inclusion of a relative clause (the dog that was hairy), or long due to the inclusion of prenominal adjectives (the big and hairy dog). The subjects' task was to read each sentence while their eye movements were monitored and then judge whether the sentence was grammatical. We found that early closure sentences were judged grammatical less often than were late closure sentences, and sentences with a long ambiguous phrase, particularly one made long through the insertion of a relative clause, were judged grammatical less often than were those with a short ambiguous phrase. The reading time data, however, showed a curious pattern. Reading times on the disambiguating word of the sentences (yawned in the above example) were longer for early closure than for late closure sentences, as expected, but reading times were shorter for sentences with a long ambiguous phrase. We argue that the latter finding reflects subjects' tendency to read more quickly as they proceed through a sentence. We suggest that researchers interpret any studies showing differences in the processing of syntactically easy and difficult constructions with extreme caution, unless the words being compared in these studies are preceded by the same number of words in the different experimental conditions.