Does local coherence lead to targeted regressions and illusions of grammaticality?

Local coherence effects arise when the human sentence processor is temporarily misled by a locally grammatical but globally ungrammatical analysis ("The coach smiled at THE PLAYER TOSSED A FRISBEE by the opposing team"). It has been suggested that such effects occur either because sentence processing occurs in a bottom-up, self-organized manner rather than being under constant grammatical supervision (Tabor, Galantucci, & Richardson, 2004), or because local coherence can disrupt processing due to readers maintaining uncertainty about previous input (Levy, 2008). We report the results of an eye-tracking study in which subjects read German grammatical and ungrammatical sentences that either contained a locally coherent substring or not and gave binary grammaticality judgments. In our data, local coherence affected on-line processing immediately at the point of the manipulation. There was, however, no indication that local coherence led to illusions of grammaticality (a prediction of self-organization), and only weak, inconclusive support for local coherence leading to targeted regressions to critical context words (a prediction of the uncertain-input approach). We discuss implications for self-organized and noisy-channel models of local coherence.