Recovery from misinterpretations during online sentence processing

Abstract

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of comprehension processes and online reading behavior when misinterpretations occurred due to lexical-semantic ambiguity. Ninety-six adult participants read "garden-path" sentences in which an ambiguous word was disambiguated toward an unexpected meaning (e.g., "The ball was crowded"), while their eye movements were monitored. A meaning coherence judgment task required them to decide whether or not each sentence made sense. Results suggested that readers did not always engage in reinterpretation processes but instead followed a "good enough" processing strategy. Successful detection of a violation of sentence coherence and associated reinterpretation processes also required additional processing time compared to sentences that did not induce a misinterpretation. Although these reinterpretation-related processing costs were relatively stable across individuals, there was some evidence to suggest that readers with greater lexical expertise benefited from greater sensitivity to the disambiguating information, and were able to flexibly adapt their online reading behavior to recover from misinterpretations more efficiently. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Figure 1.. Illustration of reinterpretation processes in a semantic garden-path sentence.

A reader will usually initially activate and integrate the dominant (most frequent) meaning of the ambiguous word (1). However, to understand this sentence successfully, she will need to detect a violation to sentence coherence at the disambiguating information (2), and trigger appropriate reinterpretation processes to activate and integrate the intended subordinate meaning of the ambiguous word into the sentence context (3).

Figure 2.. Relationship between participants’ Vocabulary and Print Exposure scores.

Panel a. shows distribution plots for performance on the Vocabulary and Print Exposure measures. Panel b. shows the correlation (r = 0.53, p < .001) between the two measures.

Figure 3.. Relationship between lexical expertise and eye tracking measures in different sentence regions.

Scatterplots for gaze duration, and go-past time in the Main Noun region (where no differences between conditions were expected) show a comparison between combined ambiguous conditions (Coherent Ambiguous and Anomalous Ambiguous) and combined unambiguous conditions (Coherent Unambiguous and Anomalous Unambiguous), reflecting the analyses performed (panel a.). Scatterplots for all other measures compare the Coherent Ambiguous to the Coherent Unambiguous condition (panels b. and c.).