ABSTRACT
The parsing principle of minimal attachment predicts that a noun phrase occurring after verbs such as “report” or “indicate” will first be assumed by readers to be the direct object of the verb. If this hypothesis turns out to be false, as in clausal-complement sentences such as “The attendant indicated the main exit was blocked,” then readers should be led up the garden path. The first experiment found no evidence for “garden-pathing” as a general rule. The second experiment showed that, when verbs were classified according to their dominant usage in direct-object versus clausal-complement constructions, garden-pathing did occur for direct-object expectation verbs. Thus, lexical information about the characteristic usage of a verb directs the parser’s initial decisions, rather than a general parsing strategy such as minimal attachment. The third experiment indicated the possibility of individual differences in readers’ susceptibility to garden-pathing.
