What is the scanpath signature of syntactic reanalysis?

Which repair strategy does the language system deploy when it gets garden-pathed, and what can regressive eye movements in reading tell us about reanalysis strategies? Several influential eye-tracking studies on syntactic reanalysis (Frazier and Rayner, 1982, Meseguer et al., 2002 and Mitchell et al., 2008) have addressed this question by examining scanpaths, i.e., sequential patterns of eye fixations. However, in the absence of a suitable method for analyzing scanpaths, these studies relied on simplified dependent measures that are arguably ambiguous and hard to interpret. We address the theoretical question of repair strategy by developing a new method that quantifies scanpath similarity. Our method reveals several distinct fixation strategies associated with reanalysis that went undetected in a previously published data set (Meseguer et al., 2002). One prevalent pattern suggests re-parsing of the sentence, a strategy that has been discussed in the literature (Frazier & Rayner, 1982); however, readers differed tremendously in how they orchestrated the various fixation strategies. Our results suggest that the human parsing system non-deterministically adopts different strategies when confronted with the disambiguating material in garden-path sentences.

► We present a new, general method for analyzing sequences of eye fixations.
► Using this method we evaluate theories of syntactic reanalysis in reading.
► In contrast to earlier results, it appears that rereading is a common strategy.
► Scanpath patterns suggest that readers differ tremendously in how they respond to garden-path sentences.