Avoiding the garden path: Eye movements in context

Abstract

Pragmatic factors, such as referential context, influence the decisions of the syntactic processor. At issue, however, has been whether such effects take place in the first or second pass analysis of the sentence. It has been suggested that eye movement studies are the only appropriate means for deciding between first and second pass effects. In this paper, we report two experiments using ambiguous relative/complement sentences and unambiguous controls. In Experiment 1 we show that referential context eliminates all the first pass reading time differences that are indicative of a garden path to the relative continuation in the null context. We observe, however, that the context does not eliminate the increased proportion of regressions from that disambiguating continuation. We therefore introduce a regression-contingent analysis of the first pass reading times and show that this new measure provides an important tool for aiding in the interpretation of the apparently conflicting data. Experiment 2 investigated whether the results of Experiment 1 were an artifact of the kinds of questions about the contexts that were asked in order to encourage subjects to attend to the contexts. The results demonstrated that the use of explicity referential questions had little effect. There was some small evidence for a garden path effect in this second experiment, but the regression-contingent measure enabled us to locate all garden path effects in only a small proportion of trials and to conclude that context does influence the initial decisions of the syntactic processor.