Selective rereading in Chinese garden path sentences
Huandi Chen, Min-Tzu Wu, and Patrick Sturt
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2025
Regressive eye movements are commonly observed in response to syntactic ambiguities, yet their characteristics and role in ambiguity resolution remain unclear. This study examined two key questions about rereading in Chinese garden-path sentences: (1) whether rereading is selective, meaning that readers allocate more or longer fixations to specific regions following garden-path disambiguation and (2) whether rereading facilitates comprehension by aiding the recovery of the globally correct interpretation. We therefore conducted an eye-tracking experiment on sentences featuring a naturally occurring syntactic ambiguity (NP1 + VP + NP2 + de + NP3). The results provide clear evidence of selective rereading, as readers refixated the ambiguous region after encountering processing difficulty. However, these refixations did not aid ambiguity resolution, suggesting that while regressions reflect sensitivity to processing disruptions, they do not always contribute to successful reinterpretation.