Three self-paced reading experiments examined the effect of context on interpreting subsequent sentences and in the difficulty of revising initial misinterpretations of subsequent temporarily ambiguous sentences. Target sentences containing noun phrase/sentence (NP/S) coordination ambiguities were preceded by contexts that either did or did not…

The results of two text-change experiments are reported. The experiments were designed to investigate the syntactic representation of garden path sentences such as "While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods", specifically the claim that a significant number of misinterpretations of such sentences are due to…