The role of prosodic focus in the reanalysis of garden path sentences: Depth of semantic processing impedes the revision of an erroneous local analysis

Research on post-repair representations of garden path sentences has found that readers systematically arrive at misinterpretations even after displaying evidence of reanalysis (Christianson et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2001). These comprehension errors have been attributed to the semantic interpretation associated with the incorrect parse persisting past disambiguation, but less is known about the mechanism driving this phenomenon (Sturt, 2007; Slattery et al., 2013). A speeded auditory comprehension experiment examined the depth of semantic processing as an independent influence on the strength of semantic persistence, drawing on known effects of pitch accent on the processing of focus-related semantic meaning (Fraundorf et al., 2010). Participants heard garden path sentences with early/late-closure ambiguity (e.g., While Anna dressed the baby stopped crying) with a sharply rising pitch accent on either the unambiguous adjunct subject or the ambiguously transitive adjunct verb, followed by a comprehension question that probed whether the incorrect late-closure analysis persisted. Since the pitch accent is often a strong cue for semantic focus when it occurs in prosodically marked phrase-medial positions, we reasoned that a deeper semantic processing would be facilitated for the late-closure analysis only when the verb receives a pitch accent. Findings indicate that a pitch accent on the verb significantly decreased accuracy without a corresponding increase on response time, suggesting that a deeper semantic processing of the erroneous parse can strengthen its resistance to revision without necessarily interfering with the process of structure-building.