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Abstract:
Garden-path sentences, where later syntactic information makes an initial structure infelicitous (While Mark investigated the murder occurred), require reconciliation of conflicting semantic and syntactic cues, providing insight on what mechanisms drive syntactic repair and how initial incorrect parses affect comprehension. Previous work has shown that reading times at disambiguation regions (occurred) remain unaffected despite semantic biases, suggesting separate mechanisms for semantic processing and syntactic repair. We investigated the integration of information in garden-path sentence reading in a self-paced reading experiment, varying the presentation order of sentences and comprehension questions. Questions preceding sentences provide a strong cue to direct reading effort, potentially facilitating processing. We found that preceding comprehension questions resulted in longer response times and longer overall reading times while not affecting response accuracy. This suggests that comprehension questions alter participants’ strategies in reading but do not affect representations obtained, calling into question the link between reading times and comprehension.
