Lost on the garden path: Misinterpretations of garden path sentences and “good enough” language processing
Kiel Christianson
Assistant Professor
Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning
Educational Psychology
4PM, Thursday, April 6 at Lucy Ellis Lounge
The traditional assumption in psycholinguistics is that structural reanalyses of so-called garden path sentences such as While Anna bathed the baby that was cute and cuddly spit up on the bed is automatic and complete. Recent examinations of the interpretations people have after reading such sentences, however, suggest that this is not always the case. I present data from four studies that suggest syntactic reanalysis might terminate before a licit syntactic structure is built, or, at least before the reanalyzed structure is mapped onto a semantic representation. My colleagues and I argue that our results provide evidence for “good enough” processing, which need not be either automatic or complete.