Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of "noisy-channel garden-path" sentences
A key question in psycholinguistics is how inferences about the meaning of linguistic input unfold incrementally a comprehender's mind. In this work, we study reading dynamics for ``noisy-channel garden-path'' sentences, which temporarily appear well-formed but feature late-appearing violations of expectation that can be resolved not by inferring an alternative syntactic structure, but by inferring the presence of an error. We find evidence for targeted regressions -- eye movements towards regions that are promising loci of possible errors in light of later-arriving information, showing patterns consistent with the posterior inferences of a model of noisy-channel processing with reanalysi...
| Authors | Thomas Hikaru Clark, Roger Levy, Edward Gibson |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 May 2026 |
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