Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report a self-paced reading study that investigated garden-path sentences like While the boy washed {a/the} dog barkedloudly and While the man hunted {a/the} deer ran into thewoods. In such sentences, the critical noun phrase (dog, deer)tends to be misparsed as an object of the preceding verb, andhas to be re-analyzed as a subject of the following clause whenthe disambiguating verb (e.g. barked, ran) is encountered. Tobetter understand how discourse level information guides real-time processing, we build on earlier corpus work in linguisticswhich found a relationship between syntactic function andinformation status: Entities in subject position tend to bealready-mentioned (old/given) information and definite, whileentities in object position are typically new information andindefinite. We investigated whether the information status ofthe ambiguous noun influences the extent of processingdifficulty, and whether this effect also depends on the argumentstructure of the first verb. Results from self-paced readingshowed that information status matters when processing theambiguous NP after optionally transitive verbs (e.g. hunt) butnot after reflexive absolute verbs (e.g. wash). These resultssuggest that access to discourse-level representations during re-analysis of the noun phrase is modulated by verb argumentstructure