The effects of thematic fit and discourse context on syntactic ambiguity resolution

Three experiments were conducted to assess the impact of the thematic fit and discourse context on the processing of sentences that were initially syntactically ambiguous between main verb and reduced relative constructions. Specifically, we tested a strong version of a constraint satisfaction position that suggests that thematic fit and context should produce a garden path effect on a simple, main verb construction. Across three experiments we observed garden path effects for reduced relative target sentences in first-pass reading-time measures, but similar effects for main verb sentences did not occur despite the thematic fit information and discourse contexts which were biased toward the reduced relative reading. The pattern of results is consistent with the predictions of the garden path theory. (C) 2001 Academic Press.