Grammatical Search and Reanalysis

This paper investigates the extent to which existing structural commitments constrain the human parser's search for grammatical analyses of incoming material, specifically whether a Reanalysis As a Last Resort (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigate this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis is pitted against a nonlocal attachment requiring no reanalysis. This ambiguity is created by embedding classic noun phrase/sentential complement ambiguities inside a relative clause modifying a subject NP. The results of both experiments indicate that readers' existing structural commitments do constrain their subsequent parsing decisions: nonlocal analyses which avoid reanalysis are consistently favored over local analyses which require an easy reanalysis. This conclusion is confirmed by the results of a subcategorization-bias manipulation in Experiment 2, which shows that readers show a consistent bias to avoid reanalysis, rather than a general bias for either local or matrix clause attachments.

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