Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical conditions were designed to induce readers to construct the ultimately correct analysis just prior to being garden-pathed by the incorrect analysis. In both experiments, the earliest measures of the garden path effect were not modulated by this manipulation. However, there was significantly less regressive re-reading of the sentence in those conditions in which the correct analysis was likely to have been constructed, then abandoned, at an earlier point. These results suggest that a syntactic analysis that is abandoned in the course of processing a sentence is not lost altogether, and can be re-activated or retrieved from memory. Implications for models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.
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