What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis?
- 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, readersWhich 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.…
Author details: | Titus Raban von der MalsburgORCiDGND, Shravan VasishthORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.02.004 |
ISSN: | 0749-596X |
Title of parent work (English): | Journal of memory and language |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Place of publishing: | San Diego |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2011 |
Publication year: | 2011 |
Release date: | 2017/03/26 |
Tag: | Eye movements; Individual differences; Parsing; Reading; Scanpaths; Syntactic reanalysis |
Volume: | 65 |
Issue: | 2 |
Number of pages: | 19 |
First page: | 109 |
Last Page: | 127 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft |