Fernanda Ferreira

Department of Psychology. University of Edinburgh

Date and Place

Dijous 18 Octubre a les 12h

Facultat de Psicología. Dep.t. Psicologia Bàsica

Abstract

Parsing Plurals

The sentence/ After John and Mary left the team was not the same/ is a garden-path sentence. Most people initially interpret the NP /the team /as the object of /left/, and that analysis must be revised when the verb /was/ is encountered. Ferreira and McClure (1997) reported that this garden-path effect does not occur if the subordinate clause contains a conjoined subject and a reciprocal verb, as in /While John and Mary kissed the photographer took pictures/. But what is the relevant property of that conjoined subject? We investigated this question in three experiments in which participants' eye movements were monitored as they read garden-path sentences, appropriate controls, and  a variety of filler items. In Experiment 1 we found that ordinary plural NPs such as /the lovers/ failed to block the garden-path effect, whereas the conjoined phrase did. Experiment 2 compared /two/-phrases (/the two  lovers) /and conjoined NPs, but only the latter were effective in blocking the garden-path. In the third experiment, a conjoined NP was specified in a discourse, and then a pronoun such as /they/ or the phrase /the two/ served as the subject of the reciprocal verb and took  the conjoined NP as its antecedent. This manipulation blocked the garden-path effect as effectively as a conjoined NP in the garden-path sentence itself. We conclude that conjoined NPs are uniquely effective at creating an 'atomic' representation, which is necessary for the reciprocal feature on the reciprocal verb to be activated quickly enough to block the garden-path effect.