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  -