Questions: Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Question 1

What does the garden-path effect (as in 'The horse raced past the barn fell') demonstrate about sentence comprehension?

• A. That comprehenders delay all structural analysis until reaching the end of the sentence
• B. That comprehenders build syntactic structure incrementally, committing to an initial parse that sometimes requires costly reanalysis
• C. That reduced relative clauses are grammatically ill-formed in English
• D. That passive constructions are universally more difficult to process than active ones

Answer: (B)

The garden-path effect occurs because the parser does not wait — it immediately commits to the most probable syntactic analysis word by word. 'The horse raced past the barn' looks like a complete simple sentence (horse = agent of raced), so the parser treats it as one. When 'fell' arrives, this analysis fails and reanalysis must occur: 'raced' must be a reduced relative clause ('the horse that was raced past the barn'). The difficulty comes from premature commitment, not delayed processing.

Question 2

The mental lexicon is organized alphabetically, similar to a printed dictionary, which is why semantically related words (like 'doctor' and 'nurse') are not stored near each other.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

The mental lexicon is organized by multiple dimensions simultaneously — meaning, sound, morphological family, and frequency — not alphabetically. Priming experiments demonstrate this directly: processing 'doctor' facilitates faster recognition of 'nurse' because the two concepts are semantically associated and activate each other in the lexical network. Alphabetical proximity has no predictive power for priming effects; semantic and phonological proximity does.

Question 3

A reader stumbles at the word 'fell' in 'The horse raced past the barn fell.' Explain what happened during processing and what this reveals about how the language comprehension system is designed.

Model answer: The parser initially analyzed 'The horse raced past the barn' as a complete simple sentence with the horse as agent of 'raced.' When 'fell' arrived, this parse failed: 'raced' must be a reduced relative clause ('the horse that was raced past the barn fell'). The difficulty reveals that the parser commits to structural analyses incrementally using fast heuristics — preferring simple main-clause structures — which normally work efficiently but occasionally require costly reanalysis.

Garden-path effects are evidence precisely because they are failures. Smooth, successful processing leaves few observable traces — it happens automatically and below awareness. But when the parser's heuristic misfires and reanalysis is required, processing difficulty becomes measurable (in reading time, eye-tracking fixations, or self-reports of confusion). These moments expose the underlying mechanisms the same way that engineering failures reveal the design assumptions built into a system.