Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities in Declarative and Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data
type: CreativeWork
description: Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the into phrase can only be interpreted as the goal argument of the verb. Thus, PP2 necessarily supplants PP1’s initially assigned position as goal, and PP1 must be reanalyzed as a modifier of the object NP (the paperwork). Interrogative versions of the same sentence structure (Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase?) may have a different profile. They have been informally judged to be easier to process than their declarative counterparts, because they are less susceptible to the initial garden path analysis. The study presented here represents an attempt to find a behavioral correlate of this intuitive difference in processing difficulty. The experiment employs the Double Reading Paradigm (Fodor, Macaulay, Ronkos, Callahan, and Peckenpaugh, 2019). Participants were asked to read aloud a visually presented sentence twice, first without taking any time at all to preview the sentence content (Reading 1), and then again after unlimited preview (Reading 2). The experimental items were created in a 2 x 2 design with one factor being Speech Act (declarative vs. interrogative) and the other being PP2 Status, i.e., PP2 could only be an argument of the verb iv (Arg), as above, or else PP2 could be interpreted as a modifier (Mod) of the NP within the preceding PP, as in She had / Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer of her filing cabinet(?). …
abstract: Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the into phrase can only be interpreted as the goal argument of the verb. Thus, PP2 necessarily supplants PP1’s initially assigned position as goal, and PP1 must be reanalyzed as a modifier of the object NP (the paperwork). Interrogative versions of the same sentence structure (Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase?) may have a different profile. They have been informally judged to be easier to process than their declarative counterparts, because they are less susceptible to the initial garden path analysis. The study presented here represents an attempt to find a behavioral correlate of this intuitive difference in processing difficulty. The experiment employs the Double Reading Paradigm (Fodor, Macaulay, Ronkos, Callahan, and Peckenpaugh, 2019). Participants were asked to read aloud a visually presented sentence twice, first without taking any time at all to preview the sentence content (Reading 1), and then again after unlimited preview (Reading 2). The experimental items were created in a 2 x 2 design with one factor being Speech Act (declarative vs. interrogative) and the other being PP2 Status, i.e., PP2 could only be an argument of the verb iv (Arg), as above, or else PP2 could be interpreted as a modifier (Mod) of the NP within the preceding PP, as in She had / Had she planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer of her filing cabinet(?). …
author: Peckenpaugh, Tyler J
keywords: Phonetics and Phonology, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Syntax, parsing, prosody, human sentence processing, reanalysis, ambiguity
date published: 2019-09-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:59:21Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York