Diagnosis and Garden-Path Recovery-Case and Agreement Symptoms Revisited

Markus Bader & Josef Bayer
markus.bader@uni-konstanz.de
University of Konstanz

Why is recovery from a garden-path sometimes easy but sometimes difficult? Two major sources of the processing difficulty caused by a garden- path effect are the costs of diagnosis and the costs of cure or repair (cf. Sturt & Crocker, 1998). According to the diagnosis hypothesis proposed by Fodor & Inoue (1998), diagnosis is the most important contribution to garden-path strength. The strongest test of the diagnosis hypothesis would be a comparison where repair is held constant across conditions and only the symptom signalling the need for reanalysis varies. We have conducted several experiments making such a comparison.

A first set of experiments tested locally ambiguous object-subject (OS) sentences as below. These sentences differ only in the symptoms by which clause-final disambiguation is achieved: Due to morphological properties, (1) is disambiguated by a case-mismatch only, (2) by a number-agreement mismatch only, and (3) by a case and number-agreement mismatch.

1

Ich habe gehört, daß Fritz eine Lehrerin half.
I have heard that Fritz-DAT a teacher-NOM helped
``I heard that a teacher helped Fritz''

2

Ich habe gehört, daß Fritz ein paar Lehrerinnen halfen.
I have heard that Fritz-DAT a pair teachers-NOM helped
``I heard that a couple of teachers helped Fritz''

3

Ich habe gehört, daß Fritz einige Lehrerinnen halfen.
I have heard that Fritz-DAT some teachers-NOM helped
``I heard that some teachers helped Fritz''

Experimental results show that case-disambiguation leads to stronger garden- path effects than either number or case-and-number disambiguation. The latter two conditions did not differ from each other. This is in contrast to findings by Meng & Bader (2000) that in wh-questions number- disambiguation leads to stronger garden-path effects than case- disambiguation.

A second set of experiments investigated OS-sentences as in (4) and (5). The crucial difference between these sentences and the sentences above is that the sentences in (4) and (5) contain verbs for which the OS-order is the unmarked, base-generated order, whereas the OS-structure in (1)-(3) is derived by moving the object in front of the subject.

4

Mir ist erzählt worden, daß Maria ein Buch gegeben wurde.
Me is told been that Maria-DAT a book-NOM given was
``I have been told that a book was given to Maria.''

5

Mir ist erzählt worden, daß Maria einige Bücher gegeben wurden.
Me is told been that Maria-DAT some books-NOM given were
``I have been told that some books were given to Maria.''

In (4), disambiguation is by case alone, in (5) it is by case and agreement. (4) and (5) elicited a clear garden-path effect, but type of disambiguation had no effect at all.

We will show how our new results as well as the prior results of Meng & Bader (2000) can be explained within a variant of the diagnosis model which makes diagnosis crucially dependent on the HSPM's usual feature checking routines. We will present a linking and feature-checking algorithm which automatically predicts the differential effectiveness of case and number symptoms in different syntactic constructions.

References

Fodor, J. D., & Inoue, A. (1998). Attach Anyway. In J. D. Fodor & F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing. (pp. 101-141). Dordrecht etc.: Kluwer.

Meng, M., & Bader, M. (2000). Ungrammaticality detection and garden- path strength: Evidence for serial Parsing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 15, 615-666.

Sturt, P., & Crocker, M. W. (1998). Generalized monotonicity for reanalysis models. In J. D. Fodor & F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing. (pp. 365-400). Dordrecht etc.: Kluwer.