Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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A comparison of online and offline measures of

good-enough processing in garden-path sentences

Zhiying Qian, Susan Garnsey & Kiel Christianson

To cite this article: Zhiying Qian, Susan Garnsey & Kiel Christianson (2017): A comparison of
online and offline measures of good-enough processing in garden-path sentences, Language,
Cognition and Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2017.1379606

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1379606

Published online: 22 Sep 2017.

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 LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2017.1379606

REGULAR ARTICLE

A comparison of online and offline measures of good-enough processing in

garden-path sentences
Zhiying Qiana,d, Susan Garnseyb,d and Kiel Christiansonc,d
a
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; bDepartment of Psychology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA; cDepartment of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Urbana, IL, USA; dBeckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In two self-paced reading and one ERP experiments, this study tested the good-enough processing Received 15 December 2016
account, which states that readers sometimes misinterpret sentences like While the man hunted the Accepted 29 August 2017
deer ran into the woods because they fail to fully revise the syntactic structure [Christianson, K.,
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 11:46 22 September 2017

KEYWORDS
Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J. F., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden Garden-path sentences;
path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 368–407. doi:10.1006/cogp.2001.0752]. Such an account good-enough processing;
predicts more evidence of reanalysis at the disambiguation on correctly- than incorrectly- reanalysis; P600; plausibility
answered trials. Experiment 1, which asked Did the man hunt the deer? and Experiment 2, which
asked Did the sentence explicitly say that the man hunted the deer? showed no difference in
reading time between trials with correct and incorrect responses. Experiment 3 found the
amplitude of P600 was unrelated to comprehension accuracy. These results converged to
suggest that failure to reanalyse ambiguous sentences is not the primary reason for
misinterpretation. Three norming studies revealed instead response accuracy was influenced by
likelihood of events described in the sentences and questions.

1. Introduction Traditional sentence processing models disagree on

the timing of the parser’s use of non-syntactic infor-
When people read sentences such as example (1) below,
mation to constrain the building of syntactic structure,
they typically slow down at the main clause verb ran, pre-
but they all assume that the parser eventually reaches
sumably because they initially interpret the noun phrase
the correct interpretation that is consistent with the lin-
the deer that was brown and graceful as the object of the
guistic input, at least most of the time. Most parsing
subordinate clause verb hunted. On that analysis, the
models would explain the garden-path effect in sen-
main clause verb ran appears to lack a subject, so reana-
tences such as (1) as the result of an initial decision to
lysis is triggered to make the deer its subject. Successful
attach the noun immediately following a potentially tran-
reanalysis includes both detaching the deer from the
sitive verb as its object. The models differ, however,
object role of the subordinate verb hunted and attaching
about the nature and timing of effects of factors such
it instead as the subject of the main clause verb ran, since
as the likelihood that an optionally transitive verb is
English does not allow a noun to fill both syntactic roles
being used transitively, or the plausibility of the particu-
simultaneously in sentences like these. Garden-path sen-
lar noun as an object of the particular verb (Ferreira &
tences such as (1) have been studied extensively in the
Clifton, 1986; Frazier & Fodor, 1978; Frazier & Rayner,
psycholinguistic literature (Ferreira & Henderson, 1990;
1982; Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, & Lotocky, 1997; Mac-
Pickering & Traxler, 2003; Pickering, Traxler, & Crocker,
Donald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; McRae, Spivey-
2000; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993) with the
Knowlton, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier,
goal of distinguishing among different theories of sen-
1983; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994; Trueswell
tence processing.
et al., 1993).
The assumption that people eventually get to the
(1) While the man hunted the deer that was brown and correct interpretation most of the time was questioned
graceful ran into the woods. by Christianson and colleagues (Christianson, Holling-
(2) Did the man hunt the deer? worth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001; Ferreira, Christianson,
(3) Did the deer run into the woods? & Hollingworth, 2001), who demonstrated that readers

CONTACT Zhiying Qian audreyqzy@gmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 Z. QIAN ET AL.
do not always reach the correct interpretation of garden-
path sentences. After reading sentences like (1), readers
often incorrectly respond Yes to questions such as (2)
while also correctly responding Yes to questions such
as (3). Thus, they seem to interpret the sentence as
meaning both that the man hunted the deer and that
the deer ran into the woods, although this interpretation
is not licensed by the syntax (Christianson, 2008; Chris-
tianson et al., 2001; Christianson, Williams, Zacks, & Fer-
reira, 2006; Ferreira et al., 2001). The error rate for
questions such as (2) was over 70% in Christianson
et al. (2001), and that pattern has been replicated in
follow-up studies (Christianson et al., 2006; Ferreira &
Patson, 2007). The high error rate for questions such as
(2), together with the low error rate for questions such
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as (3), led Christianson and colleagues to conclude that
reanalysis processes succeeded in attaching the deer as
subject of the main clause verb ran, but not in removing
it from the direct object role in the subordinate clause.
They argued that incomplete reanalysis allowed the mis-
interpretation derived from the initial misparse (i.e. the
man hunted the deer) to linger and influence question
responses.
One criticism of interpreting the high error rate to
comprehension questions such as (2) as reflecting linger-
ing initial misinterpretation is that readers might have
answered the questions based on inferences that could
naturally be drawn from the sentences. This possibility
is supported by the high error rate to questions following
unambiguous versions of the sentences, which are dis-
ambiguated with a comma after the subordinate clause
verb as in (4) below, or by swapping the order of the
two clauses as in (5) below.
(4) While the man hunted, the deer that was brown and
graceful ran into the woods.
(5) The deer that was brown and graceful ran into the
woods while the man hunted.
In Christianson et al. (2001), the error rate to questions
such as (2) was over 70% after reading sentences such as
(1), and as high as 42% and 51% after reading unambigu-
ous versions like (4) and (5), respectively. The 20%–30%
difference in question response accuracy between
ambiguous and unambiguous sentence versions can
be ascribed to garden-pathing, but the still-high error
rate for unambiguous sentences suggests that there
were also other reasons for incorrect question responses,
such as the inference that the deer that ran into the
woods was most likely the same deer that the man
was hunting.
In order to focus more directly on syntactic reanalysis
and lessen the influence of inference on response rates,
Christianson et al. (2001) included sentences and ques-
tions such as (6) and (7).
(6) While Anna dressed the baby that was cute and small
spit up on the bed.
(7) Did Anna dress the baby?
These sentences used subordinate verbs that differed
in an important way from those used in sentences such
as (1). The subordinate verbs in sentences such as (1)
were optionally transitive verbs (OPT), which can be
used either transitively or intransitively. When they are
intransitive, it must be inferred whether they have an
object and what that object is. In contrast, the subordi-
nate verbs in sentences such as (6) were reflexive absol-
ute transitive (RAT) verbs. Such verbs can also be used
transitively or intransitively, but when they are intransi-
tive, their subject is also their object (hence the label
“reflexive”). Successful reanalysis of (6) leads to the
interpretation that Anna dressed herself, whereas suc-
cessful reanalysis of (1) leaves unspecified what the
man hunted. Christianson et al. (2001) found that
readers made about 20% fewer errors after reading tem-
porarily ambiguous sentences with RAT verbs than after
temporarily ambiguous sentences with OPT verbs, which
could be ascribed to the absence of inferences drawn
about what the unspecified object was for sentences
with RAT verbs. Readers did still make more errors after
ambiguous (50%) than after unambiguous sentences
(10%) with RAT verbs, however, suggesting that they
were sometimes garden-pathed by the ambiguous
versions.
A possible alternative explanation for the incorrect
question responses found by Christianson and col-
leagues is that they were due to a reactivation of the
initial misinterpretation by the questions themselves,
which directly probed the misinterpretation (Nakamura
& Arai, 2016; Sturt, 2007; van Gompel, Pickering,
Pearson, & Jacob, 2006). On this view, the reason there
were more incorrect responses after ambiguous sen-
tences was that the surface form of the question was
more similar to the ambiguous sentences than to the
unambiguous sentences, since the latter had an
additional comma.
To address this concern, several studies have either
changed the form of the questions to make them less
likely to reactivate the initial misinterpretation (Naka-
mura & Arai, 2016) or used more indirect and implicit
measures to examine whether the initial misinterpreta-
tion lingers, including measuring reading times for
words later in the sentence that are incompatible with
the initial misinterpretation (Jacob & Felser, 2016; Sturt,
2007), syntactic priming (van Gompel et al., 2006),

grammaticality judgments (Lau & Ferreira, 2005), proces-
sing of newly-learned structures (Kaschak & Glenberg,
2004), paraphrasing (Patson, Darowski, Moon, & Ferreira,
2009), processing of subsequent sentences (Slattery,
Sturt, Christianson, Yoshida, & Ferreira, 2013), and sen-
tence-picture matching (Malyutina & den Ouden, 2016).
For example, Patson et al. (2009) asked people to para-
phrase sentences they had just read and found that
they produced more paraphrases that retained the
meaning of the initial misanalysis (e.g. The man hunted
the deer and it ran into the woods) after reading ambigu-
ous than unambiguous sentences, suggesting that the
meaning of initial misparse lingered. van Gompel et al.
(2006) asked participants to read sentences that were
either ambiguous or disambiguated with a comma and
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then to complete a subsequent sentence fragment
(While the doctor was visiti … ). Participants produced
more transitive completion structures following ambigu-
ous than unambiguous sentences, which was inter-
preted as showing that even after reanalysis was
conducted, the initially incorrect direct object interpret-
ation remained activated and was thus available to
prime the structure produced in the subsequent sen-
tence completions. Slattery et al. (2013) had participants
read sentences such as (8) and (9) while having their
eye movements monitored. They reported longer
reading times at himself in (8) in the ambiguous and
plausible condition (hid the jewel) than the ambiguous
and implausible condition (hid the guard) and a
gender mismatch effect at himself in (9) in both ambig-
uous and unambiguous conditions. These findings
showed that even after reanalysis was completed, the
parser still failed to erase the semantics derived from
the initial misparse (See Sturt, 2007, for similar con-
clusion using a different structure).
(8) While the thief hid (,) {the jewel/the guard} from the
gallery could be seen on the security camera. The
thief hid himself in a place where the cameras
couldn’t see him.
(9) After the bank manager telephoned(,) David’s {father/
mother} grew worried and gave himself approximately
five days to reply.
Using more implicit measures, the studies described
above provide evidence that lingering misinterpretation
is unlikely to be just an artifact of explicit comprehension
questions. Christianson et al. and Ferreira et al. con-
cluded that the ambiguous noun is successfully attached
to the main clause after reanalysis is performed because
readers respond accurately to the question Did the deer
run into the woods?. However, it seems that the interpret-
ation of the temporarily ambiguous noun as the direct
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 3
object of the subordinate clause verb appears to
remain, given that readers make frequent errors answer-
ing the question Did the man hunt the deer?.
Effects of lingering misinterpretation have also been
found in sentences with other types of syntactic ambigu-
ity (Christianson & Luke, 2011; Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004;
Lau & Ferreira, 2005; Nakamura & Arai, 2016; Sturt, 2007).
Lingering misinterpretation appears to be typical rather
than a special property of the direct object/main clause
ambiguity in sentences such as (1). For instance, Sturt
(2007) constructed sentences with direct object/senten-
tial complement temporary ambiguity such as those in
(10) below, in which the garden-path is easier to
recover from than direct object/main clause ambiguities
as in (1) above (Grodner, Gibson, Argaman, & Babyony-
shev, 2003; Sturt, Pickering, & Crocker, 1999).
(10) a. The explorers found the South Pole was actually
right at their feet.
b. The explorers found the South Pole was impossible
to reach.
The underlined segment of the sentences in (10)
above was either consistent (a) or inconsistent (b) with
the initial misinterpretation. In this study, an ambiguity
effect was found to be localised to the disambiguating
verb (was), which Sturt (2007) interpreted as indicating
that reanalysis was completed quickly. Crucially,
despite that, readers still read final segments that con-
flicted in meaning with the initial misanalysis more
slowly than those that did not, suggesting that the
initial misinterpretation lingered even though reanalysis
was completed.
Even misinterpretation that is activated only very
briefly before being abandoned can persist and affect
the processing of what follows (Kaschak & Glenberg,
2004; Lau & Ferreira, 2005). Kaschak and Glenberg
(2004) trained one group of participants with sentences
that contained a novel-to-them structure as in (11)
below, while a control group instead read sentences
with a familiar structure as in (12). In (11), cleaned could
be analyzed temporarily as a modifier as in The wood
floor needs cleaned corners, while the same analysis was
not possible in (12). In a subsequent testing session,
both groups read sentences like (13), in which there
were participial adjective modifiers (cooked vegetables).
The group that had been exposed to the novel construc-
tion read cooked faster than the group that had not,
suggesting that when cleaned was misanalysed as a par-
ticipial modifier in at least some trials in the training
session, the misanalysed structure remained activated
and facilitated the modifier reading of cooked in (13).
 4 Z. QIAN ET AL.
(11) The wood floor needs cleaned before our parents get
here.
(12) The wood floor needs to be cleaned before our
parents get here.
(13) The meal needs cooked vegetables so the guests will
be happy.
While there is now some consensus that interpret-
ation from an initial misparse lingers, there is not consen-
sus about what causes it. Lingering misinterpretation has
been ascribed to shallow syntactic processing (Clahsen &
Felser, 2006; Frisson, 2009) or underspecified syntactic
structure built by the parser (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro,
2002; Sanford & Sturt, 2002; Swets, Desmet, Clifton, & Fer-
reira, 2008), memory traces left from the process of com-
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puting the initial parse (Kaschak & Glenberg, 2004),
shallow and underspecified semantic processing
(Barton & Sanford, 1993), and fast-decaying syntactic
structure (Sachs, 1967; Sturt, 2007).
Several processing accounts, however, have ascribed
the lingering misinterpretation to incomplete reanalysis,
including the Attach Anyway and Adjust Principle (Fodor
& Inoue, 1998), lexically guided tree-adjoining grammar
(Ferreira, Lau, & Bailey, 2004; Lau & Ferreira, 2005; Slattery
et al., 2013) and the Good-Enough Processing Account
(Christianson, 2016; Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira
et al., 2001; Karimi & Ferreira, 2016). According to the
Attach Anyway and Adjust Principle, the parser attaches
every incoming word into the existing structure even if
such integration results in syntactic incompatibility.
When syntactically illicit structure results, the parser
starts to revise the structure step by step in a backward
manner. In sentences such as example (1), ran is initially
analyzed as the matrix verb although it lacks a subject.
The parser then revises the already-built structure by
stealing the deer from the subordinate clause and attach-
ing it to the main clause. It then proceeds to reinterpret
hunted as an intransitive verb. However, reanalysis may
cease before it is completed, resulting in what Fodor
and Inoue (1998) call the Thematic Overlay Effect,
which has the deer remaining both as the patient of
hunted and the agent of ran. Similarly, Ferreira and col-
leagues’ lexically guided tree-adjoining grammar
(LTAG) account proposes that the correct structure
built after reanalysis is overlaid onto the initial incorrect
structure because the initial incorrect structure has not
decayed in memory. The not-yet-decayed incorrect
structure competes with the correct structure to influ-
ence the processing of subsequent sentences until
decay is completed. This process results in a “tree-spli-
cing” structure that has the correct structure spliced
onto the initial incorrect structure (Christianson et al.,
2001).
Most relevant to the present study is the Good-
Enough Processing Account (Christianson et al., 2001;
Ferreira et al., 2001, 2002; Ferreira & Patson, 2007;
Karimi & Ferreira, 2016), which states that when the
interpretation derived from the initial misanalysis is sen-
sible, the parser does not bother to fully reanalyse the
structure even though later information is syntactically
incompatible with it. The Good-Enough Processing
Account assumes a dual-pathways processing model, in
which a semantic processing route and a morphosyntac-
tic processing route operate independently and each
outputs its own interpretation. When the interpretations
delivered by the two routes fail to converge, the parser
reconciles them, resulting in a final interpretation that
is not completely faithful to the linguistic input. In the
case of garden-path sentences such as (1), the sensible
meaning derived from the initial misanalysis cancels
out the need for computing detailed structure via the
morphosyntactic processing route, leading to incom-
plete syntactic reanalysis and the resulting lingering mis-
interpretation from the initial misparse.
In a series of experiments, Ferreira and colleagues
demonstrated that the parser sometimes opts for the
interpretation derived from the semantic heuristics,
especially when the syntactic algorithm is demanding
and the syntactically licensed interpretation is implausi-
ble (Christianson, Luke, & Ferreira, 2010; Ferreira, 2003;
Karimi & Ferreira, 2016). In Ferreira (2003), participants lis-
tened to sentences such as (14)-(17), and then answered
questions about the agent and patient roles of these
sentences.
(14) The dog bit the man.
(15) The man bit the dog.
(16) The man was bitten by the dog.
(17) The dog was bitten by the man.
Participants made errors to implausible passives (The
dog was bitten by the man.), but not plausible and
implausible actives and plausible passives. Most of the
errors involved flipping the thematic roles. In English,
the NVN word order usually maps onto Agent-Verb-
Patient thematic roles. In the case of implausible pas-
sives, the word-order heuristic delivers an analysis with
the dog being the agent and the man being the
patient, which is in conflict with the output from the syn-
tactic processing route. Because NVN word-order is a
very powerful heuristic and the nouns fit well with its
usual thematic role assignments, the NVN heuristic over-
rides the interpretation from the syntactic route, result-
ing in misinterpretation. In processing sentences like
(17), outputs from the syntactic route that are not con-
sistent with world-knowledge are “normalized” by the

plausibility heuristics to make the sentence sensible
(Bever, 1970; Ferreira, 2003; Townsend & Bever, 2001).
Evidence from electrophysiological studies has also
suggested that the semantic processing route some-
times cancels out or wins over the syntactic processing
route (Kuperberg, 2007). Kim and Osterhout (2005)’s par-
ticipants read sentences like The hearty meal was devour-
ing the kids. Since a meal cannot devour something,
devouring should elicit an N400 effect, which is an ERP
component that indexes how easily a word’s meaning
can be integrated with context (Kutas & Federmeier,
2011; Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). However, the response to
devouring showed instead an effect on the P600 com-
ponent, which is usually elicited by syntactic violations
(Hagoort, Brown, & Groothusen, 1993; Osterhout &
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Holcomb, 1992), despite the fact that there was no syn-
tactic violation or ambiguity in the sentence. Such
“semantic P600” effects have typically been found with
role-reversal sentences (Kolk, Chwilla, van Herten, &
Oor, 2003; Kuperberg, Caplan, Sitnikova, Eddy, &
Holcomb, 2006; van Herten, Chwilla, & Kolk, 2006; van
Herten, Kolk, & Chwilla, 2005; see Kuperberg, 2007 for a
review). The semantic P600 effect provides evidence
for dual syntactic and semantic processing routes.
More importantly, the absence of the N400 effect
suggests that information derived from the semantic
route can be strong enough to cause the parser to “nor-
malize” the syntax to make it consistent with the seman-
tics (Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2008; Kim &
Osterhout, 2005; Kuperberg, 2007).
The existing literature on Good-Enough Processing
has proposed two mechanisms that could account for
lingering misinterpretation. The first is that the semantics
of the initial misinterpretation cancels out the need to
fully reanalyse the syntactic structure, resulting in incom-
plete reanalysis and lingering misinterpretation (Chris-
tianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001). The second
mechanism is that reanalysis is completed, but the
interpretations from both the initial analysis and reanaly-
sis co-exist (Ferreira, 2003; Ferreira et al., 2004; Slattery
et al., 2013). In other words, according to the Good-
Enough Processing Account, if either reanalysis of the
syntactic structure is incomplete, or syntactic reanalysis
succeeds but both analyses remain, then the initial mis-
interpretation can linger. We will refer to the first mech-
anism as the “Incomplete Reanalysis” version and the
second mechanism as the “Lingering Misinterpretation”
version of the Good-Enough Processing Account.
The Incomplete Reanalysis version of the model makes
the prediction that the more evidence there is of reanaly-
sis during the processing of garden-path sentences, the
more likely it should be that reanalysis is successfully com-
pleted and thus the less the initial misinterpretation
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 5
should linger. The present study aims to test that predic-
tion, using both reading time and ERP measures obtained
while people read garden-path sentences as indices of
the amount of time and effort spent on reanalysis, as is
widely assumed about such measures. Assuming that
responses to comprehension questions directly probing
the initial misinterpretation reflect whether or not it per-
sists beyond the end of the sentence, then the Incomplete
Reanalysis Account predicts that there should be more
evidence of reanalysis during the sentence for trials with
correctly answered questions than for those with incor-
rectly answered questions. If longer reading time at the
disambiguating verb reflects more time spent on reanaly-
sis and thus a higher likelihood of its successful com-
pletion, then longer reading times should predict fewer
incorrect responses to questions that probe the initial mis-
interpretation. This prediction has been tested in children
by Wonnacott, Joseph, Adelman, and Nation (2016) and
for a different kind of ambiguous structure by Christian-
son and Luke (2011). Neither found a reliable relationship
between reading time measures at critical sentence
regions and subsequent responses to comprehension
questions. However, neither had a good chance of
finding such a relationship, given how few trials per con-
dition were used in their studies – six in Christianson and
Luke’s study and two in Wonnacott et al.’s study. Once
reading times were conditionalized on question
responses, very few trials remained per cell. Thus, it is
important to test the predicted relationship between criti-
cal-region reading times and subsequent question
responses in a study with more power to detect such a
relationship. It is also desirable to test the predicted
relationship between reading times and question
responses for the same kind of sentences whose proces-
sing the Good Enough Processing Account was initially
developed to account for.
There is a similar prediction to be made about the
P600 component in ERP waveforms, which is associated
with syntactic processing, including detection and reana-
lysis of syntactic anomaly (Friederici, Mecklinger,
Spencer, Steinhauer, & Donchin, 2001; Frisch, Schle-
sewsky, Saddy, & Alpermann, 2002; Gouvea, Phillips,
Kazanina, & Poeppel, 2010; Hagoort et al., 1993; Osterh-
out, Holcomb, & Swinney, 1994), as well as other
aspects of syntactic integration in sentences (Gouvea
et al., 2010; Kaan, Harris, Gibson, & Holcomb, 2000).
P600 amplitude has been found to be larger when reana-
lysis is more difficult (Osterhout et al., 1994) and also
when attention is called to syntactic problems in sen-
tences (Hahne & Friederici, 2002). If larger P600 ampli-
tude at the disambiguating verb in ambiguous
sentences indexes more complete reanalysis, then
larger P600 amplitude should predict fewer incorrect
 6 Z. QIAN ET AL.
responses to questions that probe the initial misinterpre-
tation. Following this logic, the studies presented here
compare either reading times (Experiments 1 and 2) or
P600 amplitudes (Experiment 3) at the disambiguating
verb between trials with correct and incorrect responses
to questions that directly probe the initial misinterpreta-
tion, to test the Incomplete-Reanalysis explanation for
lingering misinterpretation. Slower reading times and
larger P600 amplitudes for ambiguous sentences on
trials where the probe questions are answered correctly
than for sentences on trials where the probe questions
are answered incorrectly would support such an expla-
nation. Another possible outcome, however, is that
slower reading times and/or larger P600 amplitude
may simply indicate the amount of difficulty understand-
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ing the sentence rather than specifically the likelihood
that it has been successfully reanalysed. In that case,
the meaning of such measures in the literature more
generally might need to be reconsidered.
The severity of garden-pathing and the likelihood of
recovery from garden-pathing have been found to be
affected by the distance between the temporarily ambig-
uous noun and the point of disambiguation, presumably
because the parser assigns thematic roles at the heads of
phrases (Ferreira & Henderson, 1991, 1998; Frazier &
Clifton, 1998; Tabor & Hutchins, 2004; Van Dyke &
Lewis, 2003; Warner & Glass, 1987). Readers judge the
sentence While the man hunted the deer that was
brown and graceful ran into the woods as less acceptable
than While the man hunted the brown and graceful deer
ran into the woods, probably because in the version
with post-noun modification the parser has been com-
mitted for a longer time to the incorrect direct object
analysis of deer by the time the disambiguating verb is
reached, and therefore has more trouble abandoning it
(Ferreira & Henderson, 1991, 1998). Perhaps reflecting
that commitment, readers make more errors on compre-
hension questions that target the misinterpretation fol-
lowing sentences with post-noun-modification (the deer
that was brown and graceful) than those with pre-
noun-modification (the brown and graceful deer) (Chris-
tianson et al., 2001). Because the primary goal of the
studies presented here was to compare trials with
correct and incorrect post-sentence question responses,
it was crucial to obtain enough trials with each type of
response. Toward that goal, the sentences in our
studies used post-noun modification.
2. Experiment 1
The Incomplete-Reanalysis explanation of the Good-
Enough Processing Account predicts that there should
be more evidence of reanalysis in ambiguous garden-
path sentences whose post-sentence questions are
answered correctly than in those whose questions are
answered incorrectly. Experiment 1 tested this prediction
in a self-paced reading experiment using garden-path
sentences with both OPT verbs (e.g. hunted) and RAT
verbs (e.g. dressed). We examined the relation between
reading times at the disambiguating verb and accuracy
on comprehension questions that probed the lingering
misinterpretation (e.g. Did the man hunt the deer?)
2.1. Method
2.1.1. Participants
Thirty-two undergraduate students (12 males; mean age
18.5; range 18–21) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign participated in Experiment 1. All were native
speakers of English, had normal or corrected-to-normal
vision and gave written informed consent.
2.1.2. Materials and design
Experimental sentences consisted of 40 sets of sentences
with OPT verbs and 24 sets of sentences with RAT verbs,
with each set including an ambiguous version and a
comma-disambiguated unambiguous version, as illus-
trated below in (18) and (19). In all sentences, the ambig-
uous noun was followed by a relative clause that
comprised two adjectives (e.g. that was brown and grace-
ful). Across the experiment, each OPT verb was used in
just one item set and each RAT verb was used in two
item sets, because there are fewer RAT verbs than OPT
verbs in English. All sentences with OPT verbs and half
of the sentences with RAT verbs were taken from Chris-
tianson et al. (2001). The other half of the sentences
with RAT verbs were newly constructed. In Christianson
et al. (2001), the relativizer for all sentences was that. In
the present study, who was used instead for human
ambiguous nouns (e.g. the baby who was cute and
small) because it sounds more natural.
(18) OPT verb:
Ambiguous: While the man hunted the deer that
was brown and graceful ran into the
woods.
Unambiguous: While the man hunted, the deer that
was brown and graceful ran into the
woods.
Question: Did the man hunt the deer?
(19) RAT verb:
Ambiguous: While Anna dressed the baby who was
cute and small spit up on the bed.
Unambiguous: While Anna dressed, the baby who was
cute and small spit up on the bed.
Question: Did Anna dress the baby?

Critical sentences were distributed across two lists
using a Latin square design, so that each participant
saw only one version from each item set and saw
equal numbers of sentences in each condition. Each sen-
tence was followed by a comprehension question that
directly probed the misinterpretation.
Ninety-two distractors were added to each list for a
total of 156 trials/list. There were three types of distrac-
tors: (1) unambiguous sentences with subordinate-
matrix clause order (e.g. While Jennifer held the cigar
that was aged and expensive she told bad jokes; 40 sen-
tences); (2) unambiguous sentences with matrix-subordi-
nate clause order (e.g. The mother comforted the toddler
who was chubby and scared while the clown handed
him a balloon; 40 sentences); and (3) ambiguous and
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unambiguous versions of sentences using reciprocal
verbs such as met, which are similar to RAT verbs in
that their subject is also their object when no other
object is specified [e.g. As Jane and Mary met(,) the men
from Florida drove past them; 12 items]. Comprehension
questions to the first two types of distractors asked
about the content of various parts of the sentences,
and questions to the third type of distractors asked
about the initial misinterpretation (e.g. Did Mary meet
the men?). Answers to the first two types of distractors
were half Yes half No across the experiment. All sen-
tences were pseudo-randomised with the constraint
that no two experimental items appeared consecutively
and were presented to all participants in the same order
across all lists.
2.1.3. Procedures
Participants sat in a dimly lit and sound-attenuated
booth in front of a 23-inch LCD monitor. To make presen-
tation mode comparable for the self-paced reading and
ERP experiments, sentences were presented one word
Figure 1. Error rates for post-sentence question responses in
Experiment 1. Error bars in all figures show standard errors cor-
rected for the within-subjects design.
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 7
at a time in white 26-point Arial font on a black back-
ground in the centre of the screen. Each trial began
with a “Ready” prompt that stayed on the screen for
one second. Each time participants pressed a button
on a Cedrus-830 response box, the current word was
replaced by the next one in the centre of the screen. Fol-
lowing each sentence, a comprehension question was
presented for two seconds, followed by a screen display-
ing, for example, “Left: Yes Right: No” choices for a
maximum of four seconds. Participants pressed one of
the two mouse buttons to indicate their responses. The
positions of Yes and No choices on the screen were coun-
terbalanced. Feedback about question accuracy was not
given, but a “Too Slow” message appeared when partici-
pants did not respond within four seconds. A total of 156
sentences were divided into four blocks of 39 sentences
each, with each block containing the same number of
items of each condition. Participants took a short break
after each block. A practice block of seven trials was
added at the beginning. The entire experiment took
approximately 40 min to complete.
2.2. Results
Comprehension accuracy for distractor trials was used
to determine whether participants were paying atten-
tion. All participants were above 80% correct (range
80%–97%, mean 90%), indicating that they were attend-
ing. Thus, all participants’ data were included in the
analyses.
Mixed effects models were used in R (R Development
Core Team, 2008) to analyze question response accuracy
(logit mixed-effect models), question response times,
and reading times for critical sentence regions (linear
mixed-effects models), with subjects and items as
random effects and ambiguity as a fixed effect (Jaeger,
2008). In the analyses of question response accuracy,
reading time at the disambiguating region and its inter-
actions with ambiguity were also included as fixed
effects. For all analyses, the initial model included a
maximal random effects structure with random inter-
cepts and random slopes for all fixed effects for both
subjects and items (Barr, Levy, Scheepers, & Tily, 2013).
The final models reported here are the most complex
models that converged. For the logit mixed-effect
models used to analyze question response accuracy,
beta estimates, standard errors, and z- and p-values for
fixed effects are reported. For the linear mixed-effect
models used to analyze question response times and
sentence reading times, beta estimates, standard errors
and t-values are reported, with t > 2 being interpreted
as significant. Items with OPT verbs and RAT verbs
were analyzed separately.
 8 Z. QIAN ET AL.
2.2.1. Question responses
Response accuracy and response times for the questions
are shown in Figures 1 and 2 below, separately for the
two types of verbs. (In all figures, standard error bars
have been adjusted for the within-subjects design;
Morey, 2008; see also Cousineau, 2005; Loftus &
Masson, 1994). Logit mixed-effect analysis showed that
there were more erroneous Yes responses for ambiguous
than unambiguous sentences for both OPT verbs (16%;
β = 1.1, SE = 0.23, z = 4.73, p < .001) and RAT verbs (25%;
β = 1.87, SE = 0.38, z = 4.93, p < .001). These error rates
are very similar to those found in previous studies
using these kinds of sentences and questions (e.g. Chris-
tianson et al., 2001).
Linear mixed-effect analysis of question response
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times revealed an interaction between ambiguity and
response accuracy for both verb types (OPT: β = 159.98,
SE = 72.66, t = 2.20; RAT: β = 207.58, SE = 92.01, t = 2.26),
which arose because correct responses were non-reliably
slower than incorrect ones for ambiguous items, while
for unambiguous items there was a non-reliable differ-
ence in the opposite direction (all t’s < 2).
2.2.2. Sentence reading times
Reading times were analyzed at two sentence regions:
1) the disambiguating region, consisting of the disam-
biguating verb (e.g. ran) and the word following it,
and 2) the post-disambiguating region, consisting of
the 1–3 words following the disambiguating region
through the end of the sentence. The post-disambigu-
ating region was analyzed to address the possibility
that reanalysis effects might spill over onto sub-
sequent words, as often happens with self-paced
reading times.
Figure 2. Question response time in Experiment 1 separately by
question response accuracy. Percentages reflect the unequal
numbers of trials contributing to the bars for correct and incor-
rect question responses.
Prior to analysis, word-by-word reading times that
were faster than 100 ms or slower than 2000 ms were
excluded, leading to a loss of 0.5% of the data. Reading
times were also excluded from further analysis for sen-
tences after which participants failed to respond to the
comprehension question within four seconds, eliminat-
ing 2% of the data. Reading times above or below 2.5
standard deviations (SD) from the mean were replaced
by the 2.5 SD cut-off value for each participant, affecting
3% of the data. To remove individual differences in
reading speed, statistical results reported below were
based on length-corrected residual reading times com-
puted separately for each participant by entering their
reading times for every word in all sentences (including
distractors) into a regression equation that took
reading time as the dependent variable and word
length as the independent variable, and then subtracted
the predicted reading times from the actual reading
times (Ferreira & Clifton, 1986; Trueswell et al., 1994).
For ease of exposition, however, the graphs show
trimmed reading times before the length-correction pro-
cedure, which in all cases showed the same pattern of
results as the length-corrected times.
Figure 3 below shows reading times on the disambig-
uating region broken down by the accuracy of responses
to the subsequent questions. For sentences with OPT
verbs, the disambiguating region was read 30 ms
slower in ambiguous than in unambiguous sentences
(β = 29.99, SE = 8.53, t = 3.52), and the same pattern
was observed for sentences with RAT verbs, whose dis-
ambiguating region was read 28 ms slower in ambiguous
than in unambiguous sentences (β = 26.67, SE = 10.11,
t = 2.64). Thus, there was a typical ambiguity effect in
the disambiguating-region reading times, suggesting
that readers were garden-pathed in the ambiguous sen-
tences. The post-disambiguating region, however,
Figure 3. Reading time at the disambiguating region in Exper-
iment 1 separately by question accuracy.

showed no effect of ambiguity for either kind of verb (t’s
< = 1), suggesting that ambiguity effects did not spill
over to the following region.
Given the primary question addressed here, which is
whether spending more time on the disambiguating
region of garden-path sentences led to more accuracy
in responding to questions that probed the initial misin-
terpretation, what was evaluated in the following statisti-
cal analyses was whether disambiguating-region reading
times affected subsequent question accuracy. Results
showed that for both OPT and RAT verbs, neither the dis-
ambiguating-region reading times (z’s < 1, p’s > .1) nor
their interaction with ambiguity (z’s < 1, p’s > .1) reliably
predicted question responses. The absence of any
reliable effects of disambiguating-region reading time
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on question response accuracy indicates that question
responses were not determined by the amount of time
readers spent processing the disambiguating region.
2.3. Discussion
The results of Experiment 1 provided no evidence that
more time spent reading the disambiguating region
led to more correct question responses at the end of
the sentence. This pattern of results is rather surprising,
given the common assumption in the sentence compre-
hension literature that slowing down on the disambigu-
ating region of a garden-path sentence indicates not just
the detection of a problem but also time spent fixing it,
which should then influence responses to questions that
specifically probe whether the sentence was successfully
reanalysed.
Why did reading times at the disambiguating region
not predict question response accuracy? One possibility
mentioned earlier is that erroneous responses to the
comprehension questions are probably at least some-
times based on inferences that can easily be drawn
from the sentence content, rather than just on sentence
structure. When a man, a deer, and hunting are men-
tioned, the natural inference is that the deer is what
the man was hunting even though deer is not hunted’s
direct object in the sentence structure. Even if they
have fully revised the sentence structure, people could
answer the questions based on such inferences, with
the result that any relationship between the amount of
time spent reading the disambiguation region and ques-
tion responses would be diluted. Indeed, the 51% error
rate for questions after unambiguous sentences with
OPT verbs provides an estimate of the likelihood of
such inferences, since there would seem to be no other
reason for responding incorrectly to those. The lower
error rate (29%) for questions following unambiguous
sentences with RAT verbs is consistent with that
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 9
interpretation because sentences with those verbs are
much less susceptible to the same kind of inference.
When a sentence containing a RAT verb does not
mention an object, its subject automatically becomes
its object, whereas for sentences with OPT verbs, figuring
out their unmentioned object requires inference.
Reading times for the region following the disambi-
guation showed no effect of ambiguity, suggesting
that readers were done with whatever additional proces-
sing was triggered at the disambiguation in ambiguous
sentences. This pattern is consistent with results of eye-
tracking studies using similar kinds of sentences (Slattery
et al., 2013; Sturt, 2007). It is possible that readers may
sometimes successfully complete revising the structure
before moving on from the disambiguation, but other
times they may never complete a successful revision
but move on anyway.
To address whether incorrect responses to questions
probing the revision of garden-path sentences are
based on easily drawn inferences, it is important to try
to discourage such responses. Toward that goal, the
questions were revised in Experiment 2 to ask what the
sentence explicitly said. For example, for the deer-
hunter example the question became Did the sentence
explicitly say that the man hunted the deer? The idea
was that discouraging responses based on inferences
might allow a cleaner relationship between disambiguat-
ing-region reading times and question response accu-
racy to emerge.
3. Experiment 2
Experiment 2 differed from Experiment 1 only in the type
of question asked after each sentence. In Experiment 1,
non-explicit questions such as Did the man hunt the
deer? were asked, while in Experiment 2, explicit ques-
tions such as Did the sentence explicitly say that the
man hunted the deer? were asked to try to reduce
effects of inference.
3.1. Method
3.1.1. Participants
Forty undergraduate students (16 males; mean age 20;
range 18–25) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-
paign participated in Experiment 2. All were native
speakers of English, had normal or corrected-to-normal
vision, gave written informed consent, and received
course credit for taking part.
3.1.2. Materials and design
The same critical sentences were used as in Experiment
1, distributed across two lists according to a Latin
 10 Z. QIAN ET AL.
square design. The number of distractors was increased
from 92 in Experiment 1 to 120 here, of the following
types: (1) 40 ambiguous sentences in which the noun
immediately following a verb turns out to be the
subject of an embedded sentential complement rather
than the direct object of the main clause, along with
their unambiguous versions (e.g. The naïve girl believed
(that) the urban myth could teach her the real history);
(2) 50 sentences with matrix-subordinate clause order
in which the noun immediately following the main
clause verb is its direct object (e.g. The union leader
implied the raise when he met with strikers); (3) 20 sen-
tences with subordinate-matrix clause order like the
experimental items, but containing both a direct object
and a main clause subject (e.g. While Janis watched the
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fish she cleaned the tank); and (4) 10 unambiguous sen-
tences with matrix-subordinate clause order (e.g. The
mother served the broccoli while the kids banged the
table). Distractor types 2–4 were added so that the
overall proportion of trials on which the noun immedi-
ately following a verb turned out to be its direct object,
rather than needing to be reanalysed as the subject of
a subsequent clause, was higher than in Experiment 1
(Sentences of distractor type 1 were items for another
experiment, not reported here.). For distractor types 2–
4, the explicit question targeted various parts of the sen-
tences. Correct answers to those distractors were half Yes
half No. All sentences were pseudo-randomised with the
constraint that no two critical sentences appeared con-
secutively. Participants saw items in the same order in
all lists. A total of 184 trials were divided into four
blocks with 46 sentences each, with each block contain-
ing the same number of items of each condition.
3.1.3. Procedures
Procedures in Experiment 2 were the same as in Exper-
iment 1, except that the Yes response option always
Figure 4. Error rates for post-sentence question responses in
Experiment 2.
appeared on the left and the No option on the right,
while their positions were randomised in Experiment
1. This change led to shorter question response times
overall in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1.
3.2. Results
Average accuracy for questions following distractors was
84% (range: 70%–97%), which was slightly lower than in
Experiment 1. Answering the explicit questions was
apparently harder, presumably because it sometimes
required participants to suppress their natural inferences.
There were three participants who made over 25% errors
to distractor items, but the results reported below
include them because analyses with and without them
yielded the same pattern of results. (All effects were
slightly larger when they were excluded.)
3.2.1. Question responses
The most striking difference between the results of
Experiments 1 and 2 was a drop in the overall error
rate in question responses from 50% in Experiment 1
to 30% in Experiment 2. Using explicit questions appar-
ently succeeded, at least to some extent, in encouraging
participants to respond based on what they understood
the sentence to say had happened, rather than on infer-
ences they could easily draw from the sentences.
Response accuracy and response times for the questions
are shown in Figures 4 and 5 below, separately for the
two types of verbs.
Compared to Experiment 1, question response error
rates decreased for both ambiguous and unambiguous
sentences with both verb types, but did so especially
for unambiguous sentences. Similar to the Experiment
Figure 5. Question response time in Experiment 2 separately by
question response accuracy. Percentages reflect the unequal
numbers of trials contributing to the bars for correct and incor-
rect question responses.

1 results, logit mixed-effect models revealed reliably
more incorrect responses to questions after ambiguous
than unambiguous sentences for both verb types (OPT:
29%; β = 2.24, SE = 0.18, z = 12.25, p < .001; RAT: 28%; β
= 2.18, SE = 0.60, z = 3.66, p < .001), as in Experiment 1.
Question response times in Experiment 2 were about
250 ms faster overall than in Experiment 1 because the
Yes and No response options were always presented in
the same positions on the screen in Experiment 2,
while their positions were randomised in Experiment
1. As in Experiment 1, there was a reliable interaction
between ambiguity and response accuracy for question
response times for both verb types (OPT: β = 235.81, SE
= 89.69, t = 2.63; RAT: β = 461.39, SE = 90.94, t = 5.07),
but it was in many ways opposite the interaction
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observed in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2 for both
verb types, response times were slower for incorrect
than correct responses, though reliably so only for the
unambiguous sentences (OPT: 277 ms: β = 208.79, SE =
65.92, t = 3.17; RAT: 430 ms; β = 402.67, SE = 68.60, t =
5.87; ambiguous condition ts < 2).
3.2.2. Sentence reading times
Data trimming and analyses procedures were the same
as for Experiment 1. Removing word-by-word reading
times faster than 100 ms or slower than 2000 ms led to
the loss of 1% of the data. Removing reading times for
trials on which participants failed to respond to the com-
prehension question by the deadline eliminated 0.2% of
the data. Replacing reading times that were above or
below 2.5 SD away from the mean with the cut-off
values for each participant affected 3% of the data.
Reading times at the disambiguating region broken
down by question response accuracy are illustrated in
Figure 6. Reading time at the disambiguating region in Exper-
iment 2 separately by question accuracy. Percentages reflect
the unequal numbers of trials contributing to the bars for
correct and incorrect question responses.
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 11
Figure 6 below. Disambiguating region reading times
showed a bigger effect of ambiguity than in Experiment
1 for both types of verbs, with 50 ms longer reading
times for ambiguous than unambiguous sentences
with OPT verbs (β = 53.99, SE = 9.75, t = 5.54) and 55 ms
longer for ambiguous than unambiguous sentences
with RAT verbs (β = 58.62, SE = 10.58, t = 5.54), compared
to 30 and 28 ms in Experiment 1. The larger ambiguity
effect suggests that the explicit questions led people to
read the ambiguous sentences more carefully.
The main question in these studies concerns the
relationship between disambiguating-region reading
times and post-sentence question responses, and Exper-
iment 2 did find such a relationship, while Experiment 1
did not. In Experiment 2, there was an effect of disambig-
uating-region reading time on question response accu-
racy in sentences with OPT verbs (β = 0.29, SE = 0.08, z
= 3.40, p < .001), with incorrect question responses in
both the ambiguous and unambiguous conditions
associated with longer reading times, as shown in
Figure 6. (In Experiment 1, there was a non-reliable
trend in the same direction.) However, reading times at
the disambiguating region of items with RAT verbs
were not reliably related to question response accuracy
(β = 0.06, SE = 0.13, z = 0.45, p > .05), although they
showed the same numeric trend as items with OPT
verbs. Crucially, for both verb types, there was still no
interaction between ambiguity and disambiguating-
region reading time on question response accuracy
(OPT: β = 0.21, SE = 0.16, z = 1.27, p > .05; RAT: β = 0.01,
SE = 0.25, z = 0.03, p > .05).
Another way that the results of Experiment 1 and 2
differed was that the effect of ambiguity on reading
times persisted into the post-disambiguating region for
both verb types in Experiment 2: (OPT 19 ms; β = 22.25,
SE = 10.61, t = 2.10; RAT 30 ms; β = 35.08, SE = 14.41, t =
2.43). Thus, the explicit questions seem to have led to
more persistence of the ambiguity effect in reading
times. However, for both verb types, the reading times
at the post-disambiguating region still had no effect on
question response accuracy (ps > .05).
3.3. Discussion
There were several important differences between the
results of Experiments 1 and 2. First, the overall error
rate in question responses decreased substantially,
from 50% in Experiment 1 to 30% in Experiment 2,
suggesting that the explicit questions had the desired
effect of reducing responses based on easily-drawn infer-
ences. The decrease was bigger for unambiguous sen-
tences, leading to a bigger effect of ambiguity on
question response accuracy in Experiment 2. There was
 12 Z. QIAN ET AL.
also a bigger effect of ambiguity on reading times at
both the disambiguating and post-disambiguating
regions in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1. The expli-
cit questions clearly led people to both read the sen-
tences more carefully and rely more on what the
sentence actually said had happened in responding to
the questions. Both Christianson and Luke (2011) and
Swets et al. (2008) have shown similar effects of question
type on both online reading times and offline compre-
hension accuracy. However, in spite of this, there was
still very little relationship between reading times at
the disambiguating region and question responses. It is
not that there was no relationship at all between
reading time and question response accuracy in Exper-
iment 2, as was the case in Experiment 1. In Experiment
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2, reading time on the disambiguating region did reliably
predict question response accuracy, but the direction of
the effect was opposite that predicted by the Incomplete
Reanalysis version of the Good-Enough Processing
Account. Instead of being more likely to answer the
question correctly when they spent longer reading the
disambiguating region, which might index more work
done to reanalyse the garden path, people were actually
less likely to respond correctly on trials where they spent
longer on the disambiguation, suggesting that they
could have been more confused overall on those trials.
Furthermore, in none of the analyses of question
response accuracy in either study has there been any
interaction between ambiguity and reading time at the
disambiguation, which is what should happen according
to the Incomplete Reanalysis version of the Good-
Enough Processing Account. Time spent reading the dis-
ambiguating region specifically in the ambiguous sen-
tences is what should reflect amount of reanalysis
work, which should lead to an interaction between ambi-
guity and reading time in predicting question response
accuracy, but there was no hint of any such interaction
in either study. Thus, there is no evidence from the
reading time studies to support a claim that people
should be more likely to respond to the questions cor-
rectly if they spend more time reanalysing garden path
sentences, even in Experiment 2 where responding
based on easily-drawn inferences was reduced.
This line of reasoning assumes that time spent
reading the disambiguating region indexes the amount
of work done to reanalyse garden path sentences. It is
clear, though, that reading times are influenced by
many other factors in addition to reanalysis. The fact
that longer reading times at the disambiguation were
associated with more errors in the question responses
in Experiment 2 suggests that longer reading times
may sometimes index less success in coming to an
interpretation of the sentence. Perhaps when readers
slowed down at the disambiguation, it was at least some-
times because they had detected that something was
wrong but couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Such an
explanation should predict longer reading times on the
post-disambiguating region as well and that was true
in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1.
Because reading times on the disambiguating region
of garden-path sentences are likely to be influenced by
factors other than reanalysis, it is worth testing the
Good-Enough Processing Account using a different
kind of measure that may be less influenced by the
many factors that affect reading times. A good candidate
is the P600 component of the event-related brain poten-
tial (ERP), which is believed to be more specifically
responsive to structure processing in sentences.
4. Experiment 3
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) may provide a more
focused tool for examining the predictions of the Good-
Enough Processing Account. In particular, the P600 com-
ponent may be useful because it is believed to specifi-
cally index structure processing. In sentences like the
ones used in Experiments 1 and 2, P600 should be eli-
cited by the disambiguating verb, and its amplitude
may be related to the amount of work required to reana-
lyse the garden path.
There is currently some controversy regarding what
the P600 component indexes, but all of the accounts
involve structural processing of some kind. The P600
has been interpreted as reflecting syntactic reanalysis
of garden-path sentences (Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992,
1993, see also Osterhout et al., 1994), repair of syntactic
violations in sentences (Friederici, 1998), and syntactic
integration in structurally complex sentences (Kaan
et al., 2000). Interpreting the processes underlying differ-
ent language-sensitive ERP components has been com-
plicated by recent findings of P600 effects when N400
effects were expected instead. The studies finding
these “semantic P600” effects have all used sentences
in which there are subject and object nouns that
would be plausible arguments for the verb, but they
appear in the wrong position or with the wrong morpho-
syntactic markers for the role that would be plausible for
them (Kolk et al., 2003; Kuperberg et al., 2006; van Herten
et al., 2006, 2005). Although the semantic P600 results
have raised very interesting questions about the inter-
play of meaning and structure in sentence comprehen-
sion, all of the accounts agree that P600 reflects
something about determining and using sentence struc-
ture as part of interpreting a sentence (Gouvea et al.,
2010; Hagoort et al., 1993; Hahne & Friederici, 1999;
Kaan & Swaab, 2003; Kuperberg, 2007; Osterhout &

Holcomb, 1992). Thus, P600 effects at the disambiguat-
ing word in garden-path sentences may provide a
more specific measure of the work required to success-
fully reanalyse garden-path sentences, and thus might
better predict responses to questions specifically
probing whether reanalysis succeeded.
In Experiment 3, we made use of the P600 component
to try to specifically examine the relationship between
the amount of syntactic reanalysis work at the disambig-
uating verb and the likelihood of incorrect question
responses. The prediction was that bigger P600 at the
disambiguating verb should be associated with more
correct responses after the sentences.
4.1. Method
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4.1.1. Participants
Participants were 64 undergraduate students at the Uni-
versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. All were native
speakers of English, were strongly right-handed as
assessed by the Edinburgh inventory (Oldfield, 1971),
had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and reported
no neurological or psychiatric disorders. All gave
written informed consent and received course credits
or payment for taking part. Data from six participants
were excluded from analysis due to technical problems
with data collection or excessive loss of trials to artifacts.
Four additional participants were excluded from data
analyses because their response accuracies to distractors
were below 75%. Data analyses were conducted on the
remaining 54 participants (26 males, mean age 19.3;
range 18–22).
4.1.2. Materials and design
Critical sentences in Experiment 3 were exactly the same
as in Experiments 1 and 2, and the distractors were those
from Experiment 2. The questions asked at the end of the
sentences were the non-explicit versions, such as Did the
man hunt the deer?, as in Experiment 1. Sentences were
distributed over two lists according to a Latin square
design, and were presented to all participants in the
same order as in Experiment 2.
4.1.3. Procedures
Participants were seated comfortably in a dimly lit and
sound-attenuated booth in front of a 23-inch LCD
monitor. Each trial began with a fixation point, which
stayed in the centre of the screen for 500 ms. Because
eye movements cause artifacts that contaminate the
EEG signal, sentences were presented word-by-word at
the centre of the screen in 26-point white Arial font on
a black background, at a rate of 400 ms per word (300
ms text, 100 ms blank screen).
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 13
After each sentence, a comprehension question was
presented (e.g. Did the man hunt the deer?), with Yes
and No response choices presented below the compre-
hension question on the screen. Responses were indi-
cated by pressing one of two buttons on a Cedrus RB-
830 response box, and as in Experiment 2 (but not Exper-
iment 1), the response options appeared in the same
locations on the screen throughout the session (Yes
choices were presented on the left and No choices on
the right). A “Too Slow” warning was presented if no
response was made within four seconds. Feedback was
not given regarding response accuracy. Stimulus presen-
tation was controlled by the Presentation® software
package. Each list was divided into four blocks. Partici-
pants were given a short break after each block and
were instructed to try to minimise blinking and body
movement during the presentation of the sentences.
They were encouraged to blink between trials when
necessary. A practice block of five trials was given at
the beginning. The recording session lasted about
45 min and the entire session lasted approximately two
hours.
4.1.4. EEG recording and data analysis
Continuous EEG was recorded from 27 Ag/AgCl sintered
electrodes placed in an elastic cap (EasyCap, 10–10
system; Chatrian, Lettich, & Nelson, 1985), referenced
online to the left mastoid and re-referenced offline to
the average of left and right mastoids: midline: Fz, Cz,
Pz; lateral: AF3/4, F3/4, F7/8, FT7/8, FC3/4, C3/4, T3/4,
CP3/4, T5/T6, P3/4, P5/6, PO7/8. Eye blinks and eye move-
ments were detected with electrodes above and
beneath the right eye and at the outer canthi of both
eyes. EEG and EOG recordings were amplified by a
Grass Model 12 amplifier and sampled at a frequency
of 200 Hz. A .01–30 Hz analog bandpass filter was applied
during online recording. Impedances were maintained
below 5 kΩ.
Epochs were extracted from the continuous wave-
forms from 100 ms before the onset of the disambiguat-
ing verb through 1100 ms later. Trials contaminated with
artifacts during this epoch were rejected using the
ERPLAB toolbox (Lopez-Calderon & Luck, 2014). Blinks
and eye movements were detected using a moving
window peak-to-peak function on the EOG channels,
and non-ocular artifacts were identified using the same
moving window peak-to-peak function applied to the
EEG channels, with individualised thresholds determined
by visual inspection of each participant’s data. Data were
excluded from further analyses if artifact rejection led to
a loss of over 30% of the data in any of the conditions.
Epochs contaminated with artifacts were discarded,
leading to an average loss of 11.5% of the data, which
 14 Z. QIAN ET AL.

did not differ across conditions (OPT: ambiguous 11.5%,
unambiguous 11.6%; RAT: ambiguous 10.9%, unambigu-
ous 12.0%).
Mean amplitudes were calculated for each channel in
each condition for each participant for the 600–900 ms
time window to capture the P600 component, and
were submitted to separate repeated-measures analyses
of variance to conduct two sets of analyses. One set of
analyses included all lateral electrodes and another
included just midline electrodes. The ANOVA including
all lateral electrodes had four within-subject factors:
two levels of ambiguity (Ambiguous, Unambiguous),
two levels of question response accuracy (Correct, Incor-
rect), three levels of electrode site anteriority (Frontal,
Central, Posterior) and two levels of electrode site lateral-
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waveforms for display, but analyses were performed
before such filtering was applied.
ERP data were analyzed using analysis of variance
(ANOVA) rather than mixed effects models for purely
pragmatic reasons. The EEGLAB and ERPLAB analysis
software packages assume that what will be submitted
to statistical analyses is subject/condition means rather
than individual trials, which is consistent with ANOVA
but not with mixed effects models, since those are typi-
cally done on individual trials. It is not impossible to use
mixed effects models to analyze single-trial ERP data, but
it is substantially more difficult to get the data into the
required form, so that task has been postponed for now.

ity (Left, Right). The ANOVA including just midline elec- 4.2. Results
trodes (Fz, Cz, Pz) consisted of the same within-subject
4.2.1. Question responses
factors except that there was no laterality factor. When
The average comprehension accuracy for distractors was
interactions with electrode site in the omnibus ANOVAs
91%, suggesting that participants were attending to the
motivated further analyses, analyses were conducted
sentences. The analysis procedures for question
on six regions of interest (ROIs), each comprising four
response accuracy and response time were the same
electrodes: left anterior (AF3, F3, F7, FT7), right anterior
as in Experiments 1 and 2. Response accuracy and
(AF4, F4, F8, FT8), left central (FC3, C3, CP3, T3), right
response time for the questions are shown in Figures 7
central (FC4, C4, CP4, T4), left posterior (P3, T5, P5, PO7)
and 8 below. As in Experiments 1 and 2, there were
and right posterior (P4, T6, P6, PO8). When there were
more incorrect responses for the ambiguous than unam-
no interactions involving the laterality factor, it was col-
biguous sentences for both verb types (OPT: 18%; β =
lapsed over and analyses were conducted on three
0.85, SE = 0.21, z = 4.06, p < .001; RAT: 19%; β = 1.19,
ROIs: anterior (AF3, F3, F7, FT7, AF4, F4, F8, FT8), central
SE = 0.23, z = 5.22, p < .001). The overall error rate was
(FC3, C3, CP3, T3, FC4, C4, CP4, T4) and posterior (AF4,
similar to Experiment 1, which used the same non-expli-
F4, F8, FT8, FC3, C3, CP3, T3). Analyses within ROIs
cit questions.
included two within-subject factors: two levels of ambi-
Question response times were 595 ms slower overall
guity and two levels of question accuracy. The Green-
than in Experiment 1 and 925 ms slower overall than in
house-Geisser correction was applied wherever
Experiment 2 because of differences in the timing of
necessary to correct for violations of sphericity (Green-
the presentation of the Yes/No response options on the
house & Geisser, 1959). Corrected p-values and original
degrees of freedom are reported. Grand average ERPs
were digitally low-pass filtered at 10 Hz to smooth the

Figure 8. Question response time in Experiment 3 separately by

question response accuracy. Percentages reflect the unequal
Figure 7. Error rates for post-sentence question responses in numbers of trials contributing to the bars of correct and incorrect
Experiment 3. question responses.

screen. In Experiment 3, the question and the response
options appeared simultaneously, so response times
included both reading the question and responding to
it. In contrast, in Experiments 1 and 2 the response
options appeared 2 sec after the question appeared, so
response times did not include time spent reading the
question. As in Experiments 1 and 2, there was an inter-
action between ambiguity and response accuracy for
question response times for both verb types (OPT: β =
145.91, SE = 53.32, t = 2.74; RAT: β = 149.07, SE = 73.72,
t = 2.02). The interaction here was similar to that found
in Experiment 2, with incorrect responses slower than
correct ones, especially for unambiguous items.
4.2.2. ERPs
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ERP results are reported below only for the items with
OPT verbs because not enough participants had
enough trials available in every cell for a meaningful
analysis of items with RAT verbs. This was more a
problem for items with RAT verbs than for those with
OPT verbs because there were both fewer trials/con-
dition for RAT verbs (12 vs 20) and fewer incorrect
responses for items with RAT verbs. Only 23% of the
items with RAT verbs were responded to incorrectly, so
many participants had very few or even no trials contri-
buting to that cell.1
Visual inspection revealed that the waveforms for the
disambiguating verb (e.g. ran) in items with OPT verbs
were more positive during the P600 time window
(600–900 ms) in the ambiguous than the unambiguous
condition, as illustrated for sentences with OPT verbs in
Figure 9. As is typical for P600, the effect was centropar-
ietally distributed. ANOVAs over all lateral electrodes
revealed a main effect of ambiguity, F(1,53) = 4.45,
p < .05, and an interaction between ambiguity and
the anteriority of electrode location, F(2,106) = 11.61,
p < .001, which arose because the P600 effect was
significant at central sites, F(1,53) = 6.58, p = .01 and pos-
terior sites, F(1,53) = 15.91, p < .001, but not at frontal
sites, F < 1. ANOVAs over the midline electrodes
showed the same pattern, with a main effect of ambigu-
ity, F(1,53) = 5.90, p < .05, and an interaction between
ambiguity and anteriority, F(2,106) = 8.18, p < .001,
because the P600 effect was significant at Cz, F(1,53) =
6.72, p = .01 and Pz, F(1,53) = 11.77, p = .001, but not at
Fz, F < 1.
When the waveforms were broken down by question
response accuracy, visual inspection revealed that the
P600 ambiguity effect for sentences with correct
responses did not appear to differ from that for sentences
with incorrect responses, as shown in Figure 9B and C
(ambiguous correct mean voltage: 1.35 μV; ambiguous
incorrect: 1.28 μV; unambiguous correct: 0.48 μV;
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 15
unambiguous incorrect: 0.46 μV). This observation was
confirmed by statistical analysis. In the ANOVAs over all
lateral electrodes, over the midline electrodes, and over
just the centroparietal electrodes where P600 effects
tend to be maximal, there were no main effects nor inter-
actions involving question response accuracy, all Fs < 1.
Additional analyses conducted at narrower time
windows of 600–700, 700–800, and 800–900 ms, which
were done in the hope that finer-grained analyses would
reveal a relationship between the amplitudes of the
P600 at the disambiguation and question response accu-
racy, showed the same results. The P600 ambiguity
effect was significant at the central and posterior regions
(Fs > 4.79, ps < .03), but not at the frontal region, Fs < 1,
and the P600 effect did not interact with question
response accuracy in any analysis (Fs < 3.18, ps > .08).
Visual inspection also revealed that there was a Left
Anterior Negativity (LAN) effect, with trials followed by
incorrect responses being more negative than those fol-
lowed by correct responses in the left hemisphere
between 400 and 600 ms (see Figure 10). The ANOVA
over all lateral electrodes showed a marginally significant
main effect of response accuracy, F(1,53) = 3.56, p = .06,
and a marginally significant interaction between response
accuracy and laterality, F(1,53) = 3.92, p = .052, which was
resulted because the response accuracy effect was signifi-
cant at the left anterior region, F(1,53) = 4.23, p < .05, and
the left central region, F(1,53) = 6.02, p < .05, but not at
other regions, Fs < 1.95, ps > .17. Crucially, there was no
interaction between ambiguity and question response
accuracy, Fs < 1, suggesting that whatever mechanism
the LAN reflected that led to correct vs. incorrect question
responses had nothing to do with ambiguity. Thus there
was no evidence that when readers answered the ques-
tion following a garden-path sentence correctly, it was
because they had successfully reanalysed the sentence
structure by working hard at the disambiguating verb.
4.3. Discussion
The results of Experiment 3 indicated that in sentences
with OPT verbs, the disambiguating verb (e.g. ran) in
the ambiguous condition triggered a larger P600 than
in the unambiguous condition, suggesting that syntactic
reanalysis took place at the disambiguation. However,
there was no relationship between the amplitude of
the P600 effect at the disambiguation and responses to
the post-sentence questions, consistent with the
reading time data in Experiments 1 and 2. If P600 ampli-
tude indexes reanalysis effort and question response
accuracy reflects whether or not the initial misinterpreta-
tion was revised at the disambiguation, this result is
inconsistent with the Incomplete Reanalysis explanation
 16 Z. QIAN ET AL.
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Figure 9. (A) Grand average ERPs for the disambiguating verb at all electrodes in ambiguous and unambiguous sentences with OPT
verbs in Experiment 3, baselined on 100 ms before the onset of the disambiguating verb. Y-axis position indicates onset of the disam-
biguating verb. ERPs averaging across electrodes in the centroparietal region with (B) correct question responses and (C) incorrect ques-
tion responses.

of lingering misinterpretation in the Good-Enough Pro-
cessing Account, just as the reading time data in Exper-
iments 1 and 2 was.
It is not yet clear what the LAN component indexes,
since a wide range of phenomena have been found to
elicit it, including morphosyntactic agreement violations
(Coulson, King, & Kutas, 1998; Gunter, Friederici, & Schrie-
fers, 2000; Osterhout & Mobley, 1995), word concrete-
ness and imageability (Gullick, Mitra, & Coch, 2013;
Holcomb, Kounios, Anderson, & West, 1999; Kounios &
Holcomb, 1994; Lee & Federmeier, 2008; Zhang, Guo,
Ding, & Wang, 2006), working memory load related to
complex structure (King & Kutas, 1995; Kluender &
Kutas, 1993; Weckerly & Kutas, 1999), “frame-shifting” in
processing non-literal language (Coulson & Kutas,
2001), and lexical (Lee & Federmeier, 2009; Wlotko & Fed-
ermeier, 2011, 2012) or referential (Nieuwland, Otten, &
Van Berkum, 2007) ambiguity. The interpretation of
LAN has become more complicated recently because it
appears that an anterior negativity can sometimes
result from superposition of partially overlapping N400
and P600 effects that cancel each other out to varying
degrees at different scalp sites, depending on the ampli-
tude of each component (Tanner, 2015). In ambiguous
sentences with OPT verbs, when it becomes clear that
at the disambiguating verb (ran) that the deer has to be
its subject, that leaves hunted with no specified object.
Under these circumstances where the sentence does
not say what the man hunted, those trials that received
a more thorough analysis of the plausibility of the deer
as the object of hunted, given that no other object is
available, led to an increase in amplitude of the N400
component, which could emerge as a LAN when the
N400 was cancelled out by the P600 at the centroparietal
region. Another possibility is that the LAN effect in Exper-
iment 3 reflected the effort of retrieving the deer and
hunted from working memory so that plausibility could
be evaluated.

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Figure 10. Grand average ERPs for the disambiguating verb at all electrodes in ambiguous and unambiguous sentences with OPT verbs
in Experiment 3, separately by question response accuracy and based on 100 ms before the onset of the disambiguating verb. Y-axis
position indicates onset of the disambiguating verb.
The above interpretation of the LAN is consistent with
a finding that has recently been reported at a conference
but not yet published. Oines and Kim (2014) asked par-
ticipants to read role-reversal sentences that typically
elicit the “semantic P600” effect, which was introduced
briefly earlier. Sentences like The hearty meal was devour-
ing … would be expected to elicit an N400 effect at
devouring because it is nonsensical to say that a meal is
devouring something, but a P600 effect has been
observed instead. Oines and Kim asked participants to
perform one of two tasks while reading these types of
sentences. In the structural repair task, they were asked
to figure out how to fix the structure of the sentences
so that they made sense, while in the semantic inte-
gration task, they were asked to try very hard to figure
out the meanings of the sentences, given their structure.
The structural repair group showed a P600 effect while
the “semantic integration” group instead showed a
LAN. The LAN was interpreted as reflecting the need to
retrieve word order information from working memory,
since that is what determines the role meal plays in the
devouring event. In Oines and Kim’s study, the LAN was
elicited when word order was a crucial factor in deter-
mining the role of the noun with respect to the verb.
Similarly, in Experiment 3, LAN was elicited when the
ambiguous noun and the subordinate verb were
retrieved from working memory so that responses to
comprehension questions could be decided on. This
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 17
retrieval process was needed for answering questions
following both ambiguous and unambiguous sentences,
and thus there was no difference in the amplitude of the
LAN between ambiguous and unambiguous versions.
The direction of the LAN effect was consistent with
reading time data in Experiment 2, with longer reading
time or bigger LAN at the disambiguating verb leading
to more incorrect responses to comprehension
questions.
In summary, the results of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 all
converge to show that measures that have long been
assumed to index the amount of work done to reanalyse
garden-path sentences at their disambiguation does not
predict the accuracy of responses to post-sentence ques-
tions that specifically probe the success of such reanaly-
sis, even when answering the questions based on
inference was reduced in Experiment 2 and when what
has been believed to be a more specific measure of
structural reanalysis, the P600, was used in Experiment 3.
5. Experiment 4
Experiments 1–3 converged to show that unsuccessful or
incomplete reanalysis is not the primary reason for incor-
rect responses to post-sentence questions that are
specifically intended to probe reanalysis success. The
results confirm two previous reports of no relationship
between online reading time measures and question
 18 Z. QIAN ET AL.
responses (Christianson & Luke, 2011; Wonnacott et al.,
2016), and extend them by 1) bringing more power to
bear in the search for such a relationship, specifically
for the type of sentence used most widely in the
studies leading to the Good Enough Processing
Account, 2) modifying the questions to try to eliminate
inference-based responses, and 3) using the P600 ERP
component to try to restrict the online measure more
specifically to syntactic reanalysis. None of those modifi-
cations led to the emergence of a relationship between
the online processing measures and question responses.
The obvious next question is what does determine the
responses to such questions? Given the fundamental
role that incorrect responses to such questions have
played in the development of the Good Enough Proces-
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sing Account, it is an important question.
In an early study contributing to the development of
the Good Enough Processing Account, Christianson
et al. (2001) found that question responses were affected
by plausibility in addition to ambiguity and ambiguous-
region length. They manipulated the plausibility of the
critical noun as the direct object of the subordinate
clause verb by using different sentence completions, as
illustrated in (20) below. A deer that is pacing in a zoo
is less plausible as the object of hunted than one that is
running into the woods, and people answered Yes to
Did the man hunt the deer? 7%–13% less often after the
pacing-in-the-zoo version, though they still said Yes
31%–44% of the time.
(20) Plausible: While the man hunted the deer that
was brown and graceful ran into the
woods.
Implausible: While the man hunted the deer that
was brown and graceful paced in the
zoo.
The authors argued that people were more likely to
pursue reanalysis when the initial interpretation
became implausible, which in turn led to more correct
question responses. However, another possibility is that
people were less likely to answer Yes to a question
about an implausible event regardless of whether they
had successfully reanalysed the sentence. In an eyetrack-
ing study, Jacob and Felser (2016; following Sturt, 2007)
took the plausibility manipulation a step further by con-
structing sentence continuations whose meaning made
it impossible, rather than just unlikely, for the critical
noun to remain a direct object, as in While the gentleman
was eating(,) the burgers that were really huge were still
being heated in the microwave. Despite the impossibility
of eating burgers that are still in the microwave, native
English speakers answered Yes to Did the gentleman eat
the burgers? approximately 40% of the time (similar to
the result in Christianson et al., 2001, for implausible
sentences).
Although Jacob and Felser measured both reading
times and question responses, they did not attempt to
relate them to one another trial-by-trial, probably
because 5 trials/condition would not allow it. Nakamura
and Arai (2016) also measured both sentence reading
times and question responses but also did not attempt
to relate them trial-by-trial, again probably because 6–8
trials/condition precluded doing so. Their study investi-
gated native Japanese speakers reading Japanese sen-
tences containing locally ambiguous relative clauses,
which are similar to the English sentences with RAT
verbs in that there is no ambiguity about which nouns
fill which roles by the end of the relative clause. They
also presented post-sentence questions in a form that
was less likely to reactivate the initial misinterpretation.
Their goal was to test whether Japanese speakers
retained an initial interpretation after it was contradicted
by subsequent words, even though there was no remain-
ing ambiguity about which nouns were the objects of the
verbs and thus no need to infer an unspecified argu-
ment. They found evidence that the initial misinterpreta-
tion did linger and argued that previous results in English
are not entirely due to inferences drawn in the absence
of a specified object or to reactivation of the initial mis-
interpretation by the question.
Another aspect of Nakamura and Arai’s study is par-
ticularly relevant for ours, which is that they normed
the plausibility of their items and examined the effect
of item-by-item variation in plausibility on both reading
times and question responses. In a meta-analysis across
two self-paced reading studies, they found reliable
graded effects of plausibility on reading times at the criti-
cal sentence region and also a marginal effect of plausi-
bility ratings on question responses, with items whose
initial misinterpretation was rated as more plausible
more likely to elicit incorrect Yes responses. That is,
when the plausibility of the initial misinterpretation
was higher, people were more likely to retain it.
Although plausibility was not explicitly manipulated in
our studies, it became apparent across the experiments
that some items rarely elicited incorrect Yes responses
(e.g. The question Did the caricaturist draw the child?
after While the caricaturist drew the child who was freckled
and talkative stood on the sidewalk was responded to
incorrectly only 27% of the time), while others frequently
did so (e.g. The question Did the skipper sail the boat?
after While the skipper sailed the boat that was small
and leaky veered off course was responded to incorrectly
87% of the time). Thus, it seemed that sentences varied
in how much they led people to think that an event

had been described in which the temporarily ambiguous
noun still played the role of the theme of the subordinate
clause verb even though it had turned out not to be its
direct object in the sentence structure. Experiment 4
attempted to assess that for the whole sentence and
Experiment 5 attempted to do so for particular subcom-
ponents of the sentence. In Experiment 4, the exper-
imental sentences used in Experiments 1–3 were
presented as whole sentences followed by a question
asking participants to judge how likely it was that the
temporarily ambiguous noun was the direct object of
the verb in the event described in the sentence. So,
after reading While the man hunted the deer that was
brown and graceful ran into the woods., participants
were asked How likely is it that the man hunted the deer?.
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5.1. Method
5.1.1. Participants
Fifty undergraduate and graduate students (28 males;
mean age 20; range 18–28) at the University of Illinois
participated in Experiment 4. All were native speakers
of English, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision,
gave written informed consent, and received course
credit or payment for taking part.
5.1.2. Materials and procedures
Materials were the same ambiguous and unambiguous
sentences with OPT and RAT verbs that were used in
Experiments 1–3. Ambiguous and unambiguous versions
of each item were distributed across two lists according
to a Latin square design, so that no participant saw both
versions of the same sentence.
Whole sentences were presented on the computer
screen. Following each sentence, participants were
asked to give a percentage rating from 0% to 100% to
questions such as How likely is it that the man hunted
the deer?. Sentence order was randomised for each par-
ticipant. Item-by-item mean likelihood ratings were
obtained by averaging across participants and those
were then entered as a fixed effect into new logit
mixed effect models reanalysing the results of Exper-
iments 1–3 to determine whether they predicted the
question response accuracy in those studies.
5.2. Results
Statistical analysis of the mean likelihood ratings them-
selves for each item averaged across all participants
showed a main effect of verb type, F(1, 124) = 88.46,
p < .001, with items with OPT verbs rated 25% more
likely than those with RAT verbs (OPT 69%, RAT 46%; F
(1, 124) = 48.27, p < .001). Ambiguous sentences were
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 19
also rated as 17% more likely than unambiguous sen-
tences (Ambiguous 69%, Unambiguous 52%), and
there was also an interaction between ambiguity and
verb type, F(1, 124) = 8.67, p < .01, because the difference
between ambiguous and unambiguous sentences was
bigger for items with RAT verbs (26%) than for those
with OPT verbs (11%, OPT: Ambiguous 75% vs Unam-
biguous 64%; RAT: Ambiguous 59% vs Unambiguous
33%).
Logit mixed-effect models were used to evaluate the
relationship between likelihood ratings and question
responses in Experiments 1–3, by including likelihood
rating as a fixed effect. In addition, since the analysis of
the ratings showed that they were affected by ambiguity,
and question responses were also affected by ambiguity
in Experiments 1–3, ambiguity was included as another
fixed effect in the models so that the relationship
between likelihood ratings and question responses
could be evaluated separately from the effect that ambi-
guity had on both of them. The initial models all included
the interaction between ambiguity and likelihood rating,
but because this interaction was not significant for any of
the three experiments, it was removed from the models.
The results showed overall that likelihood ratings were
reliably related to question responses, such that ques-
tions after items that were rated more likely were also
more likely to be given incorrect Yes responses. Analyses
were conducted separately for items with OPT and RAT
verbs, but the verb types are shown collapsed together
in Figure 11 for each experiment because effects were
generally the same for both verb types.
For the Experiment 1 results, question responses for
items with both verb types were reliably predicted by
both ambiguity (OPT: β = .78, SE = .24, z = 3.23, p = .001;
RAT: β = 1.09, SE = .52, z = 2.07, p < .05) and likelihood
ratings (OPT: β = .39, SE = .11, z = 3.45, p < .001; RAT: β =
1.09, SE = .52, z = 2.07, p < .05), with ambiguous items
and items with higher likelihood ratings both more
likely to receive incorrect Yes responses, as shown in
Figure 11. The results for Experiment 2 showed a
similar pattern, with more incorrect Yes responses for
ambiguous items for both verb types (OPT: β = 1.71,
SE = .58, z = 2.95, p < .01; RAT: β = 1.70, SE = .74, z = 2.31,
p < .05) and for items with higher likelihood ratings for
OPT verbs (β = .02, SE = .01, z = 2.38, p < .05), but the
effect of likelihood ratings was not reliable for items
with RAT verbs (β = .02, SE = .02, z = 1.42, p > .1). In Exper-
iment 3, there were again more incorrect Yes responses
both for ambiguous items with both verb types (OPT:
β = .49, SE = .23, z = 2.16, p = .03; RAT: β = .65, SE = .33,
z = 1.95, p = .05) and for items with higher likelihood
ratings for both verb types (OPT: β = .03, SE = .01, z =
3.71, p < .001; RAT: β = .02, SE = .01, z = 2.12, p < .05).
 20 Z. QIAN ET AL.
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Figure 11. Scatterplots showing the relationship between the percentage of incorrect question responses an item received and the
item-by-item likelihood ratings in Experiment 1, 2, and 3, collapsing over items with OPT and RAT verbs.
Overall, results for items with both OPT and RAT verbs
indicated that ambiguity and the likelihood ratings had
separable effects on how readers answered the ques-
tions after the sentences. Most importantly, although
ambiguity affected both the likelihood ratings them-
selves and the question responses, there were still
effects of likelihood ratings once ambiguity effects
were taken into account.
It is interesting to note that the effect of likelihood
rating was smaller for question responses in Experiment
2, when inference-drawing was discouraged by asking
explicit questions, as can be seen in Figure 11. We inter-
preted the decrease in incorrect question responses in
Experiment 2 as due to a reduction in the number of
question responses based on easily drawn inferences.
Since the likelihood ratings obtained in Experiment 4
specifically assessed the likelihood of drawing the infer-
ences we believed to be influencing question responses
in the other studies, it is not surprising that the relation-
ship between the ratings and question responses was
much weaker when inference-drawing was minimised
in Experiment 2. The failure of likelihood ratings to
reach reliability in predicting question responses for
items with RAT verbs in Experiment 2 was likely due to
a combination of the explicit questions used in Exper-
iment 2 and the properties of RAT verbs, which also
make inference-drawing less likely because their
subject automatically becomes their object when no
other object is mentioned. Thus, the rated likelihood
that Anna dressed the baby is less likely to influence
responses to the question Did the sentence explicitly say
that Anna dressed the baby?
Additional analyses were conducted to determine
whether the reading times at the disambiguating
region in Experiments 1 and 2 and whether the P600
and LAN amplitudes in Experiment 3 were affected by
the same factors that determined the likelihood
ratings. For items with both OPT and RAT verbs in Exper-
iment 1, which used non-explicit questions, likelihood
ratings did not correlate with residual reading times at
the disambiguation (OPT: r = .02; RAT: r = .04; ps > .1). In
Experiment 2, however, when explicit questions were
used, there were very small but reliable correlations
between likelihood ratings and residual reading times
(OPT: r = .07, t = 2.34, df = 1193, p < .05; RAT: r = .07, t =
2.00, df = 853, p < .05). In Experiment 3, which used the

same non-explicit questions as in Experiment 1, item-by-
item P600 amplitude at the centroparietal region did not
correlate with likelihood ratings for either types of verbs
(OPT: r = −.07; RAT: r = .07; ps > .1). However, there was a
marginally significant correlation between likelihood
ratings and amplitude of the LAN at left anterior and
left central regions for sentences with OPT verbs (r =
−.21, t = −1.89, df = 78, p = .06). Further analysis
showed that this correlation reached significance in
unambiguous sentences (r = −.31, t = −2.01, df = 38,
p = .05). The more likely it was for an event to happen,
the more negative the LAN component was, which con-
firmed our earlier interpretation of the LAN as indexing
the amount of effort spent on retrieving the ambiguous
noun the deer and the subordinate clause verb hunted
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from the working memory in order to evaluate the
plausibility of the ambiguous noun as the direct object
of the subordinate verb. No such correlation was found
with RAT items (p > .1), probably because the small
number of RAT sentences was insufficient to average
out the amount of noise that is commonly present in
ERP studies.
Overall, correlational analyses showed that there was
either a very small (rs < = .07) or no relation between like-
lihood ratings and disambiguating region reading times/
P600 amplitude. This is consistent with the finding across
experiments that likelihood ratings predicted question
response accuracy in most cases but reading times at
the disambiguating verb did not. The correlation
between the amplitude of the LAN and likelihood
ratings suggests that event likelihood is indeed taken
into account during on-line processing of these sen-
tences. Thus, likelihood ratings of the events described
in the sentences were a better predictor of question
responses than reading times at the disambiguating
verb were. Again, it is interesting to note the small but
reliable relationship between the ratings and reading
times at the disambiguation in Experiment 2. It seems
that when participants knew an explicit question was
coming, the more likely the event described in the sen-
tence was, the more time they spent reading the disam-
biguating region that told them they should answer No.
To summarise, Experiment 4 was conducted to inves-
tigate whether or not the likelihood of the events
described in the garden-path sentences predicted ques-
tion accuracy. The goal was to try to determine whether
item-specific properties would predict question
responses better than the online processing measures
at the disambiguating region did. In retrospect, it
should not be surprising that the likelihood ratings
from Experiment 4 were so successful at predicting the
question responses in Experiments 1–3, as in all cases
the question was asked after the sentence was read,
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 21
and the likelihood rating questions were actually quite
similar to the post-sentence questions used in the
other studies. The likelihood questions in Experiment 4
(How likely is it that the man hunted the deer?) basically
asked for a graded response to almost the same ques-
tions that asked for a binary response in Experiments 1
and 3 (Did the man hunt the deer?). In Experiment 5, an
attempt was made to evaluate the likelihood of particular
subcomponents of the sentences without ever reading
the whole sentence.
6. Experiment 5
In Experiment 4, likelihood ratings were given after the
sentences were read. In Experiment 5, questions were
asked about particular parts of the sentence without
the whole sentence ever being seen. The idea was to
examine how particular sentence constituents might
have contributed to question responses in Experiments
1–3 separately from the effect of reading the whole sen-
tence and being garden-pathed when it was ambiguous.
Experiment 5a attempted to examine the effect of the
relative clause that was brown and graceful from While
the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful
ran into the woods., since it could influence how likely
the deer is to be hunted. For instance, a deer that is
cute and little might be less likely to be hunted. Exper-
iment 5b examined the effect of the main clause the
deer ran into the woods, since it could also influence
the likelihood of the event. For example, as described
above, a hunter would be less likely to hunt a deer that
is pacing in a zoo (Christianson et al., 2001).
6.1. Method
6.1.1. Materials and procedures
Two norming studies were conducted in Experiment 5. In
both of them, sentence components were rated. The first
of these norming studies (5a) asked participants to give a
percentage rating to How likely is it that a man would
hunt a deer that was brown and graceful?. This task will
be called Modifier norming. In 5b, participants were
asked to rate How likely is it that a man would hunt a
deer that ran into the woods?, which will be called Main
Clause norming. Item-by-item mean likelihood ratings
were obtained by averaging across all subjects and
were entered into logit mixed-effect models together
to see if they predicted question response accuracy in
Experiments 1–3.
6.1.2. Participants
Thirty undergraduate students (19 males; mean age 20;
range 18–22) participated in 5a and another 32 (10 males;
 22 Z. QIAN ET AL.
mean age 19; range 18–23) participated in 5b. All were
recruited from the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign and were native speakers of English. They
gave written informed consent and received course
credit for taking part.
6.2. Results
On average, the likelihood ratings for OPT items were
62% (SD = 26%) and for RAT items 59% (SD = 27%) in
the Modifier norming, and 56% (SD = 29%) for OPT
items and 55% (SD = 30%) for RAT items in the Main
Clause norming.
As in Experiment 4, ambiguity was included in all stat-
istical models to evaluate whether there were any effects
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 11:46 22 September 2017
of the Modifier and Main Clause likelihood ratings over
and above the effect of ambiguity on question response
accuracy in the other studies. For the Experiment 1
results, neither the Modifier nor the Main Clause
ratings predicted question response accuracy for sen-
tences with either OPT or RAT verbs (all p’s > .1). For
the Experiment 2 results, the Modifier ratings did
predict question response accuracy only for the sen-
tences with RAT verbs (β = .45, SE = .21, z = 2.10, p = .04),
with events rated as more likely leading to more incor-
rect Yes responses to the questions. The Modifier
ratings did not, however, similarly predict response accu-
racy for items with OPT verbs, and the Main Clause
ratings did not predict accuracy in sentences with
either type of verb (all p’s > .1). For the Experiment 3
results, the only effect was that the Main Clause ratings
predicted question response accuracy for items with
OPT verbs only (β = .02, SE = .01, z = 2.03, p = .04).
Overall, there was little or no influence of either of
these likelihood ratings on question response accuracy
in Experiments 1–3.
The goal of collecting Modifier and Main Clause likeli-
hood ratings was to elucidate the factors contributing to
the responses to the post-sentence questions in Exper-
iments 1–3, but it is also interesting to examine
whether these ratings predicted disambiguation region
reading times in Experiments 1 and 2. Because the
main clause had not yet been seen at the disambiguat-
ing region in those studies, its ratings should have no
effect on reading times at that point in the sentence,
but the modifiers have been seen by then. In both Exper-
iment 1 and 2, there were small correlations between the
Modifier likelihood ratings and reading times, such that
the disambiguating region was read more slowly in
items with higher Modifier ratings. In Experiment 1,
those correlations were reliable for items with both OPT
and RAT verbs (OPT: r = .16, t = 5.39, df = 1181, p < .0001;
RAT: r = .13, t = 3.50, df = 752, p < .001), and in
Experiment 2 they were marginal for items with both
verb types (OPT: r = .05, t = 1.70, df = 1193, p = .09; RAT:
r = .06, t = 1.75, df = 853, p = .08). No correlation was
found in Experiment 3 with either types of verbs
(ps > .5). Thus, the more likely the people in the Modifier
norming study found it that a man would hunt a deer
that was brown and graceful, the more different partici-
pants in Experiments 1 and 2 slowed down at the disam-
biguation, which was where they discovered that the
man might not be hunting the deer after all. That is,
the more plausible one group of people found the
deer plus its modifying relative clause as the object of
hunting, the more difficult other groups of people
found it to read words contradicting that state of
affairs. In other words, when the deer plus its modifying
relative clause was more plausible as the object of
hunting, it was harder for the participants in Experiments
1 and 2 to revise that interpretation, which should make
the interpretation more likely to linger and influence
responses to the post-sentence questions. However,
that turned out not to be the case – question responses
were generally not predicted by either the Modifier or
Main Clause ratings.
Since neither the modifying relative clauses nor the
main clauses from the original sentences affected ques-
tion response accuracy, the effect of the likelihood
ratings obtained in Experiment 4 on question accuracy
in Experiments 1 and 2 must be due to the likelihood
of the entire event described in the original sentence.
The more likely an event was, the more likely the
interpretation of the noun as the subordinate clause
object tended to linger, which is similar to the marginal
effect of plausibility on question responses found by
Nakamura and Arai (2016) for a different kind of locally
ambiguous sentence in Japanese.
7. General discussion
The Good-Enough Processing Account proposed two
possible explanations for why people incorrectly
respond Yes to questions like Did the man hunt the
deer? after sentences like While the man hunted the
deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods.
According to the Incomplete Reanalysis (Christianson
et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001) version of the Good-
Enough Account, the initial misinterpretation lingers
because the parser fails to completely reanalyse the syn-
tactic structure of garden-path sentences, resulting in
the ambiguous noun staying in the direct object role in
the subordinate clause. The alternative is the Lingering
Misinterpretation (Ferreira et al., 2004) version, in which
reanalysis is completed, but the results of both analyses
persist. The present studies aimed specifically to test the

Incomplete Reanalysis version, which predicts that more
reanalysis work at the disambiguation should lead to
fewer incorrect Yes responses to questions probing the
initial misinterpretation. Incomplete Reanalysis was
thus tested by using self-paced reading times and ERP
responses at the disambiguating region as measures
indexing the amount of reanalysis work done at the dis-
ambiguation, and comparing those between trials fol-
lowed by correct responses and those followed by
incorrect responses.
Two self-paced reading and one ERP experiment were
conducted with two types of post-sentence questions.
The non-explicit questions used in Experiments 1 and 3
were the same questions that had been used in several
previous studies, asking whether the temporarily ambig-
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 11:46 22 September 2017
uous noun was the object of the subordinate clause verb
(Did the man hunt the deer?/Did Anna dress the baby?).
The explicit questions used in Experiment 2 more specifi-
cally targeted the true content of the sentence (Did the
sentence explicitly say that the man hunted the deer?/Did
the sentence explicitly say that Anna dress the baby?).
The goal of the explicit questions was to discourage par-
ticipants from answering based on inferences they could
easily draw from the sentences, i.e. that the deer was
most likely what the man hunted even though the sen-
tence did not actually say that. The idea was that explicit
questions might lead to a cleaner relationship between
the online processing measures at the disambiguation
and question responses because question responses
should be less likely to be influenced by inference. The
explicit questions apparently did succeed in discouraging
inference-based responses, as the number of incorrect
question responses to both types of sentences decreased
substantially. Nevertheless, question responses were still
not predictable from the reading times at the disambigu-
ating region for sentences with either types of the verbs.
In the few instances where there was any relationship
between the online measures and question responses, it
was in the opposite direction from that predicted by the
Incomplete Reanalysis version of the Good-Enough Pro-
cessing Account. The predicted direction was that
slower reading times and larger P600 amplitudes should
reflect more reanalysis work and that that should lead
to more correct question responses, but instead slower
reading times and larger P600 amplitudes tended to be
associated with more incorrect question responses,
suggesting more confusion in general on those trials.
Thus, there was no evidence in any of the studies that
trials that elicited correct No responses to the questions
were the ones on which participants did the work necess-
ary to fully reanalyse the sentences.
The findings across our experiments converged to
show that Incomplete Reanalysis might not be the
LANGUAGE, COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE 23
primary reason for lingering misinterpretation. A likeli-
hood rating task was done in Experiments 4 and 5 to
explore whether the likelihood of the events described
in the sentences could explain question response accu-
racy. Results showed that, for sentences with both
types of verbs, the more likely the event described by
the initial misinterpretation, the more likely readers
were to answer the questions incorrectly. Thus, event
likelihood was a better predictor of response accuracy
than reading times or P600 amplitudes at the disambig-
uating region. Thus, the predictions made by the Incom-
plete Reanalysis version of the Good-Enough Processing
Account were not borne out in the present studies.
The logic underlying the present studies depends on
the common assumption that reading times and P600
amplitudes at the disambiguating region of garden-
path sentences at least partially index reanalysis.
However, our results suggest that slower reading times
and larger P600s at least sometimes indicate continuing
confusion rather than successful recovery from such con-
fusion, as it was trials with incorrect question responses
that tended to have longer reading times or larger
P600 amplitudes at the disambiguating region. This
result may be analogous to the “labor-in-vain” effect in
the memory literature (Nelson & Leonesio, 1988), which
has been discussed in the language processing literature
by Stine-Morrow and colleagues (e.g. Payne & Stine-
Morrow, 2016; Stine-Morrow et al., 2010). This raises
the issue that reading times and ERP measures taken at
the disambiguating region in garden-path sentences
may generally need to be reinterpreted.
Our results also suggest that questions intended to
specifically probe whether an initial misanalysis of a
garden-path sentence is successfully revised may not
actually be the best source of evidence, which is ironic
given that the Good-Enough Processing Account was
initially developed specifically to account for the high
number of errors in response to such questions. Given
the fundamental role that incorrect responses to such
questions have played in the development of the
Good-Enough Processing Account, it is an important
point. However, evidence in support of the Good-
Enough Processing Account has accumulated from
other sources using more implicit measures, including
syntactic priming (Christianson et al., 2010; van Gompel
et al., 2006), processing of a subsequent sentence (Slat-
tery et al., 2013), translation (Lim & Christianson, 2013a,
2013b), paraphrasing (Patson et al., 2009), responses to
different types of questions (Christianson & Luke, 2011),
and sentence-picture matching (Malyutina & den Ouden,
2016). Nevertheless, the nature of the relationship
between probe type and the representation of the sen-
tence content in memory remains largely unexamined,
 24 Z. QIAN ET AL.
despite the fact that explicit comprehension questions
are the most commonly used tool for measuring text
comprehension in many fields, including education.
The likelihood of the events described in the sen-
tences with both OPT and RAT verbs in our studies
appeared to be a stronger predictor of question
responses than online processing measures at the disam-
biguation, which is consistent with previous studies
finding effects of plausibility on the likelihood of a linger-
ing misinterpretation. Event likelihood, as measured in
our experiments, is comparable to the plausibility heuris-
tic examined in previous Good-Enough-related work (e.g.
Christianson et al., 2001, 2006; Nakamura & Arai, 2016).
For instance, Slattery et al. (2013) found that an initial
misinterpretation lingered only when the ambiguous
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 11:46 22 September 2017
noun was a plausible direct object for the subordinate
clause verb, as in While the thief hid the jewel from the
gallery could be seen on the security camera. There were
no evidence of lingering misinterpretation when the
ambiguous noun and the subordinate verb formed an
implausible interpretation, as in While the thief hid the
guard from the gallery could be seen on the security
camera. Experiments 1a and 1b in Christianson et al.
(2001) also explicitly tested the effect of plausibility on
lingering misinterpretation. The results of those exper-
iments showed that implausible (short) garden-paths
and non-garden paths alike were responded to with
error rates as low as 10% (Experiment 1b). The important
difference between the previous and present work is that
earlier explorations of plausibility (or event likelihood)
were not linked to online measures of processing. Conse-
quently, the plausibility effects detailed in the earlier
work were interpreted as having short-circuited or trun-
cated the reanalysis process. As shown by Slattery et al.
(2013) and the current work, however, there is abundant
online evidence that in fact readers usually do attempt to
deal with the error signal within the garden-path struc-
ture. Despite this effort, though, accuracy for offline com-
prehension probes remains low. Given that the
comprehension question itself is equally likely or plaus-
ible as the sentence about which it is being asked, and
that it too is read using whatever mechanisms are
employed during the reading of the sentence, it
follows that response patterns should be related to
both the plausibility of the sentence and the comprehen-
sion question. When a plausible event interpretation is
initially generated by a partial parse of a garden-path
sentence, and that interpretation is then re-activated
by an equally plausible comprehension question, the
result appears to be error-prone responses due to com-
petition between the revised interpretation and the lin-
gering original incorrect interpretation. Although the
present study did not directly manipulate the plausibility
of the initial misinterpretation, the likelihood ratings indi-
cate that the likelihood that a misinterpretation lingers is
influenced by the likelihood of events described in it. Fur-
thermore, this likelihood might be modulated by more
global cues distributed across the entire sentence (e.g.
While the man hunted the deer paced in the zoo) or by
more local cues, for example the subcategorization
requirements of the temporarily ambiguous verb (e.g.
While the man hunted the plane flew over the woods; den
Ouden, Dickey, Anderson, & Christianson, 2016). Note
that comprehension questions analogous to the ones
used here for the locally implausible sentence (i.e. Did
the man hunt the plane?) would be predicted to have a
relatively higher accuracy rate. Given that den Ouden
et al. (2016) use fMRI to show distinct brain activation pat-
terns for garden-path sentences with local vs. global
plausibility cues, further work is required to better under-
stand how qualitatively different types of likelihood or
plausibility might be related to, and affect accuracy
rates in response to, offline measures of comprehension.
In conclusion, our studies did not support the Incom-
plete Reanalysis version of the Good-Enough Processing
Account, which they were specifically designed to test.
They do not, however, rule out the Lingering Misinterpre-
tation version of the Good-Enough Processing Account,
which awaits further testing. The fact that the rated like-
lihood of the events described in a sentence was the
strongest predictor of the responses to questions follow-
ing those sentences raises the issue that responses to
such questions are determined by a variety of factors
other than those our study was designed to test. Finally,
our results further suggest that the processing difficulty
indexed by reading times and ERPs at the disambiguating
words in garden-path sentences is not always a sign of
successful reanalysis, consistent with the general tenets
of the Good-Enough Processing Account.
Note
1. A similar problem with response-contingent reading
times would have arisen in Experiments 1 and 2 if
ANOVAs had been used to analyze them, but the
mixed-effect models that were used to analyze reading
times can handle situations with missing data.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This work was funded by the Dissertation Completion Fellow-
ship and the Network for Neuro-Cultures Graduate Training

Fellowship from the Graduate College, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign to Zhiying Qian.
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