Recovery from misinterpretations during online sentence processing

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from such processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. The present study investigated the outcome of comprehension processes and on-line reading behaviour when misinterpretations occurred. Although group-level effects of reinterpretation on sentence comprehension and on-line processing are of great theoretical interest, individual differences in the recovery from processing difficulty are of particular practical relevance. Even adult readers vary considerably in their “lexical expertise”, their knowledge of word forms and meanings and their experience with written material. We therefore also investigated the effect of individual differences in lexical expertise on processes related to the recovery from misinterpretations. Ninety-six adult participants read “garden-path” sentences in which an ambiguous word was disambiguated towards an unexpected meaning (e.g. The ball was crowded), while their eye movements were monitored. A Meaning Coherence Judgement task additionally required them to decide whether or not each sentence made sense. Results suggested that readers did not always engage in reinterpretation processes but instead followed a “good enough” processing strategy. Successful detection of a violation to sentence coherence and associated reinterpretation processes also required additional processing time compared to sentences that did not induce a misinterpretation. Although these reinterpretation-related processing costs were relatively stable across individuals, there was some evidence to suggest that readers with greater lexical expertise benefited from greater sensitivity to the disambiguating information, and were able to flexibly adapt their on-line reading behaviour to recover from misinterpretations more efficiently.