Estimating the true cost of garden pathing:
- What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach capturesWhat is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous condition, and "triage" (rejecting the sentence without reanalysis; Fodor & Inoue, 2000) lead to systematic underestimates of the true cost of garden pathing. Furthermore, the "pure" garden-path effect due to encountering an unexpected word needs to be separated from the additional cost of syntactic reanalysis. To get more realistic estimates for the individual processing costs of garden pathing and syntactic reanalysis, we implement a novel computational model that includes trial-level contaminants as probabilistically occurring latent cognitive processes. The model shows a good predictive fit to existing reading time and judgment data. Furthermore, the latent-process approach captures differences between noun phrase/zero complement (NP/Z) garden-path sentences and semantically biased reduced relative clause (RRC) garden-path sentences: The NP/Z garden path occurs nearly deterministically but can be mostly eliminated by adding a comma. By contrast, the RRC garden path occurs with a lower probability, but disambiguation via semantic plausibility is not always effective.…
Author details: | Dario PaapeORCiDGND, Shravan VasishthORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13186 |
ISSN: | 0364-0213 |
ISSN: | 1551-6709 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35986666 |
Title of parent work (English): | Cognitive science |
Subtitle (English): | a computational model of latent cognitive processes |
Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell |
Place of publishing: | Malden, Mass. |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2022/08/20 |
Publication year: | 2022 |
Release date: | 2023/11/27 |
Tag: | garden-path effect; latent processes; mixture modeling; multinomial processing tree; syntactic reanalysis |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 8 |
Article number: | e13186 |
Number of pages: | 23 |
Funding institution: | Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [428960187] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |