Ungrammaticality detection and garden path strength: Evidence for serial parsing

Abstract

It is still a controversial issue whether the human sentence processor computes syntactic representations serially or in parallel. We address this question by comparing the processing of different types of ambiguous garden path sentences with the processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences. The ungrammatical sentences lead to the same type of syntactic mismatch that arises in the garden path sentences at the point of disambiguation, but they cannot be reanalysed. Using the speeded-grammaticality judgement task it is shown that factors which regulate garden path strength in ambiguous sentences also have an influence on the processing of corresponding ungrammatical sentences in that they determine how reliably the ungrammaticality is detected. We argue that this processing correlation provides evidence for serial parsing models because only serial models lead us to expect that the parser attempts reanalysis in ambiguous and ungrammatical sentences alike.