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Against repair-based reanalysis in sentence comprehension.
Daniel Grodner1, Edward Gibson, Vered Argaman
1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, NE20-437, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. dgrodner@tedlab.mit.edu
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|April 15, 2003
Summary
This study challenges structural repair in parsing, proposing reprocessing as a simpler, more realistic alternative. Experimental evidence supports reprocessing over repair for understanding sentence processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Current models of structural reanalysis in parsing assume representation-preserving repair.
- This assumption lacks strong theoretical and empirical support.
- An alternative, reprocessing, uses existing parsing mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To challenge the prevailing repair-based account of structural reanalysis.
- To propose and provide evidence for a reprocessing model.
- To differentiate between repair and reprocessing accounts experimentally.
Main Methods:
- Theoretical critique of representation-preserving repair.
- Review of existing experimental evidence (Sturt et al., 1999).
- Design and execution of a self-paced reading experiment.
Main Results:
- Empirical evidence for structural reanalysis is consistent with reprocessing.
- The proposed self-paced reading experiment distinguished between repair and reprocessing.
- Results favored the reprocessing interpretation.
Conclusions:
- The theoretical and empirical basis for structural repair is weak.
- Reprocessing offers a more parsimonious and empirically supported account of sentence processing.
- Repair-based explanations for observed data are rendered superfluous by reprocessing.