TY  - JOUR
A1  - von der Malsburg, Titus Raban
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Scanpaths reveal syntactic underspecification and reanalysis strategies
JF  - Language and cognitive processes
N2  - What theories best characterise the parsing processes triggered upon encountering ambiguity, and what effects do these processes have on eye movement patterns in reading? The present eye-tracking study, which investigated processing of attachment ambiguities of an adjunct in Spanish, suggests that readers sometimes underspecify attachment to save memory resources, consistent with the good-enough account of parsing. Our results confirm a surprising prediction of the good-enough account: high-capacity readers commit to an attachment decision more often than low-capacity participants, leading to more errors and a greater need to reanalyse in garden-path sentences. These results emerged only when we separated functionally different types of regressive eye movements using a scanpath analysis; conventional eye-tracking measures alone would have led to different conclusions. The scanpath analysis also showed that rereading was the dominant strategy for recovering from garden-pathing. Our results may also have broader implications for models of reading processes: reanalysis effects in eye movements occurred late, which suggests that the coupling of oculo-motor control and the parser may not be as tight as assumed in current computational models of eye movement control in reading.
KW  - Reading
KW  - Eye movements
KW  - Scanpaths
KW  - Parsing
KW  - Reanalysis
KW  - Individual differences
KW  - Working memory
KW  - Underspecification
Y1  - 2013
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2012.728232
SN  - 0169-0965
SN  - 1464-0732
VL  - 28
IS  - 10
SP  - 1545
EP  - 1578
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hove
ER  -