The use of thematic role information in parsing: Syntactic processing autonomy revisited

Two eye-movement experiments examined the processing of sentences containing reduced relative constructions. In the first experiment, animacy of the sentential subject, structural ambiguity, and parafoveal preview of syntactically disambiguating material were manipulated. Evidence of disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences, regardless of animacy or preview. In the second experiment, readers with high versus low verbal working memory capacity read the sentences from Experiment 1. High and low-span readers exhibited very similar patterns of processing. As in the first experiment, evidence for disruption was found in temporarily ambiguous sentences whether the sentential subject was animate or inanimate. Sentences with animate subjects were hard to interpret, and relatively late measures of processing indicated that an animate subject made ambiguity especially hard to overcome. We interpret the findings as being consistent with serial, depth-first models of parsing.