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Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some stage by discourse-level information. Evidence over the past 20 years remains mixed as to the temporal dynamics of such top-down interactions. In particular, dynamic accounts where readers use the discourse model to generate expectations for certain grammatical structures before and during parsing differ from serial accounts where an algorithmic first-pass processing mechanism precedes integration of sentence material into the discourse model. To test between these two theories, the current study investigates eye-movement behaviors when reading temporarily ambiguous attachment structures following discourses with biases either matching, mismatching, or neutral with respect to the attachment resolution. No evidence was found suggesting readers systematically use discourse information to generate structural expectations, in line with serial accounts of processing at the sentence–discourse interface. Scanpath analyses further highlight the confirmatory nature of rereading when participants encounter discourse continuations that do not fit with prior contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The results of two large-scale eye-tracking studies are reported. • A novel variable trailing mask paradigm was used to determine whether amount or location of rereading of NP/Z garden-path sentences was related to offline comprehension. • E1 presented comprehension questions after each sentence, and E2 presented the comprehension questions both before and after each sentence. • Results provide strong evidence (of multiple types) against selective reanalysis of NP/Z garden-paths. When people read temporarily ambiguous ("garden-path") sentences, the forward movement of their eyes is often interrupted by regressions. These regressions are usually followed by rereading some portion of the previously read text. Frazier and Rayner (1982) proposed the Selective Reanalysis Hypothesis (SRH), which proposed that readers regress to critical choice points in the syntactic phrase marker of garden-paths where misparses had occurred, and furthermore, then reanalyzed the syntactic structure to arrive at a correct parse in most cases. A considerable amount of more recent work, however, suggests that readers often do not derive a correct parse or interpretation from such sentences. If these more recent observations are accurate, perhaps rereading is not necessarily strategic, controlled, or predictable. The current study consists of two large-scale eye-tracking experiments designed specifically to examine where and how much people reread garden-path sentences, and whether rereading influences comprehension accuracy. A variable text-masking paradigm was employed to restrict access to portions of garden-paths and non-garden-paths during rereading. Scanpath analyses were used to determine whether some or all participants targeted syntactically critical parts of previously read text. Comprehension questions probed final interpretations. In short, readers often misinterpreted the garden-paths, and no rereading measures predicted better comprehension. Furthermore, scanpath analyses revealed considerable variation across and within readers; only small percentages of trials conformed to structurally-based predictions. Taken together, we fail to find support for structurally strategic rereading. We therefore propose that rereading of these sentences is more often "confirmatory" than "revisionary" in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an eye-tracking experiment with a trailing boundary-change paradigm as people read subject- and object-relative clauses that were either plausible or implausible. We sought to determine whether readers sometime misassign thematic roles to arguments in implausible, noncanonical sentences. In some sentences, argument nouns were reversed after participants had read them. Thus, implausible noncanonical sentences like "The bird that the worm ate yesterday was small" changed to plausible "The worm that the bird ate was small." If initial processing generates veridical representations, all changes should disrupt rereading, irrespective of plausibility or syntactic structure. Misinterpretation effects should only arise in offline comprehension. If misassignment of thematic roles occurs during initial processing, differences should be apparent in first-pass reading times, and rereading should be differentially affected by the direction of the text change. Results provide evidence that readers sometimes misassign roles during initial processing and sometimes fail to revise misassignments during rereading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]