Syntactic engagement of new words: The garden-path method applied to track sensitivity to structural ambiguity

Abstract

This article proposes an innovative approach to examining garden-path (GP) effects in sentence processing. It applies GP effects as a method to a new domain, specifically to syntactic engagement of recently learned verbs. We tested twenty-seven English native speakers and twenty Spanish learners of English to verify method validity. Three main components characterise the method, namely training of new word meaning through definitions and example sentences, eye-tracking while reading plausible and implausible GP sentences after sleep consolidation, and a meaning recall test. We also examined if participants’ phonological working memory and vocabulary size play a role in how they syntactically engage new words. Results showed that recently learned verbs can elicit syntactic engagement in both native and nonnative readers. Both vocabulary size and phonological working memory capacity could predict ambiguity reprocessing, irrespective of language group. These results indicate that garden pathing can reliably signal effort to detect and resolve subject-object ambiguities in both first language (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Pickering & Traxler, 1998) and second language readers (Chen et al., 2021, Jegerski, 2012). This feasibility study is a pioneering attempt to map new vocabulary knowledge as a window into emergent structural representations. The significance of this method lies in its potential to track syntactic engagement of new lexis, while accounting for individual differences, and following the principle that to know a word entails knowing its form, meaning, as well as its grammatical use (Nation, 2001).