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Updated: Oct 9, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: evidence of the application of verb information during parsing
L Osterhout1, P J Holcomb, D A Swinney
1Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
Abstract:
Event-related potentials were recorded from 13 scalp locations while participants read sentences containing a syntactic ambiguity. In Experiment 1, syntactically disambiguating words that were inconsistent with the "favored" syntactic analysis elicited a positive-going brain potential (P600). Experiment 2 examined whether syntactic ambiguities are resolved by application of a phrase-structure-based minimal attachment principle or by word-specific subcategorization information. P600 amplitude was a function of subcategorization biases rather than syntactic complexity. These findings indicate that such biases exist and can influence the parser under certain conditions and that P600 amplitude is a function of the perceived syntactic well-formedness of the sentence.
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