Abstract
Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers often (mis)interpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g., The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns. We tested this theory by examining the effect of sentence canonicality on the reading of a follow-up sentence. In a self-paced reading study, 60 young and 60 older adults read an implausible sentence in either canonical (e.g., It was the peasant that executed the king) or non-canonical form (e.g., It was the king that was executed by the peasant), followed by a sentence that was implausible given a good-enough misinterpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the peasant rode back to the countryside) or a sentence that was implausible given a correct interpretation of the first sentence (e.g., Afterwards, the king rode back to his castle). We hypothesised that if non-canonical sentences are systematically misinterpreted, then sentence canonicality would differentially affect the reading of the two different follow-up types. Our data suggested that participants derived the same interpretations for canonical and non-canonical sentences, with no modulating effect of age group. Our findings suggest that readers do not derive an incorrect interpretation of non-canonical sentences during initial parsing, consistent with theories of misinterpretation effects that instead attribute these effects to post-interpretative processes.
Highlights
Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers ofteninterpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g. The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns
Canonical here refers to sentences in which the agent of the action precedes the patient as is typical in English, as in active sentences (e.g. The dog bit the man as a plausible sentence; The man bit the dog as an implausible sentence); non-canonical order refers to sentences in which this order is reversed, as in passive sentences (e.g. The man was bitten by the dog; see Lim & Christianson, 2013a; Zhou & Christianson, 2016 for similar effects in subject/object relative clauses)
Bader and Meng (2018; see Meng & Bader, 2021) argued that the human parsing mechanism initially arrives at a fully correct parse of non-canonical sentences, and that this representation is accessed in a way that results in apparent misinterpretation in response to thematic role probes
Summary
Proponents of good-enough processing suggest that readers often (mis)interpret certain sentences using fast-and-frugal heuristics, such that for non-canonical sentences (e.g. The dog was bitten by the man) people confuse the thematic roles of the nouns. We tested this theory by examining the effect of sentence canonicality on the reading of a follow-up sentence. Inaccuracies were systematic, such that participants (mis)interpreted the dog as doing the biting, and the man as being bitten Based on these findings, Ferreira proposed that people’s mental representations of sentences are strongly influenced by two simple heuristics, rather than formed exclusively via an algorithmic syntactic parse. Bader and Meng (2018) distinguished between a parsing account in which the initial processing of a sentence causes misinterpretation, and a retrieval account in which the way that people are cued to retrieve information from a fragile but correct representation causes misinterpretation
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