@article{vonderMalsburgVasishth2011, author = {von der Malsburg, Titus Raban and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis?}, series = {Journal of memory and language}, volume = {65}, journal = {Journal of memory and language}, number = {2}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {San Diego}, issn = {0749-596X}, doi = {10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004}, pages = {109 -- 127}, year = {2011}, abstract = {Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier \& Rayner, 1982; Meseguer, Carreiras, \& Clifton, 2002; Mitchell, Shen, Green, \& Hodgson, 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., sequential patterns of eye fixations. However, in the absence of a suitable method for analyzing scanpaths, these studies relied on simplified dependent measures that are arguably ambiguous and hard to interpret. We address the theoretical question of repair strategy by developing a new method that quantifies scanpath similarity. Our method reveals several distinct fixation strategies associated with reanalysis that went undetected in a previously published data set (Meseguer et al., 2002). One prevalent pattern suggests re-parsing of the sentence, a strategy that has been discussed in the literature (Frazier \& Rayner, 1982); however, readers differed tremendously in how they orchestrated the various fixation strategies. Our results suggest that the human parsing system non-deterministically adopts different strategies when confronted with the disambiguating material in garden-path sentences.}, language = {en} }