TY  - JOUR
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis?
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - 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.
KW  - Reading
KW  - Syntactic reanalysis
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Parsing
KW  - Individual differences
KW  - Scanpaths
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004
SN  - 0749-596X
VL  - 65
IS  - 2
SP  - 109
EP  - 127
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Boston, Marisa Ferrara
A1  - Hale, John T.
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty
JF  - Language and cognitive processes
N2  - Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty, but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated; and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.
KW  - Reading
KW  - Parsing
KW  - Computer model
KW  - Corpus
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2010.492228
SN  - 0169-0965
VL  - 26
IS  - 3
SP  - 301
EP  - 349
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hove
ER  -