Skip to main content
Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Competing Biases in Real-Time Sentence Processing Cover

Competing Biases in Real-Time Sentence Processing

By:   
Open Access
|Jul 2026

References

  1. Adams, B. C., Clifton, C., & Mitchell, D. C. (1998). Lexical guidance in sentence processing? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5(2), 265270. 10.3758/BF03212949
  2. Baltin, M. R. (1995). Floating Quantifiers, PRO, and Predication. Linguistic Inquiry, 26(2), 199248.
  3. Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 148. 10.18637/jss.v067.i01
  4. Boeckx, N., Cedric, H., & Nunes, J. (2010). Control as Movement. Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511761997
  5. Boyce, V., Futrell, R., & Levy, R. P. (2020). Maze Made Easy: Better and easier measurement of incremental processing difficulty. Journal of Memory and Language, 111, 104082. 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104082
  6. Büring, D. (2005). Binding Theory. Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511802669
  7. Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Foris.
  8. Chomsky, N. (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. MIT Press.
  9. Clifton, C., Jr. (1993). Thematic roles in sentence parsing. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47(2), 222246. 10.1037/h0078817
  10. Clifton, C., Traxler, M. J., Taha Mohamed, M., Williams, R. S., Morris, R. K., & Rayner, K. (2003). The use of thematic role information in parsing: Syntactic processing autonomy revisited. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(3), 317334. 10.1016/S0749-596X(03)00070-6
  11. Crocker, M. W. (1996). Computational psycholinguistics: An interdisciplinary approach to the study of language (Vol. 20). Springer Netherlands.
  12. Crocker, M. W. (2010). Computational Psycholinguistics. In The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (pp. 482513). 10.1002/9781444324044.ch17
  13. Crocker, M. W., & Brants, T. (2000). Wide-Coverage Probabilistic Sentence Processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29(6), 647669. 10.1023/A:1026560822390
  14. Ferreira, F., & Clifton, C. (1986). The independence of syntactic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 25(3), 348368. 10.1016/0749-596X(86)90006-9
  15. Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. M. (1990). Use of Verb Information in Syntactic Parsing: Evidence From Eye Movements and Word-by-Word Self-Paced Reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16(4), 555568. 10.1037//0278-7393.16.4.555
  16. Ferreira, F., & Henderson, A. M. (1991). Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(6), 725745. 10.1016/0749-596X(91)90034-H
  17. Ferreira, F., & Henderson, J. M. (1998). Syntactic reanalysis, thematic processing, and sentence comprehension. In J. D. Fodor & F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in sentence processing (Vol. 21, pp. 73100). Springer Netherlands. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9070-9_3
  18. Fodor, J. D., & Ferreira, F. (1998). Reanalysis in Sentence Processing. Springer Netherlands. 10.1007/978-94-015-9070-9
  19. Forster, K. I., Guerrera, C., & Elliot, L. (2009). The maze task: Measuring forced incremental sentence processing time. Behavior Research Methods, 41(1), 163171. 10.3758/BRM.41.1.163
  20. Frazier, L. (1979). On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies [PhD Thesis, University of Connecticut]. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI7914150/
  21. Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence Processing: A Tutorial Review. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and Performance XII: The Psychology of Reading (pp. 559586). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  22. Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (1996). Construal. MIT Press.
  23. Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14(2), 178210. 10.1016/0010-0285(82)90008-1
  24. Frazier, M., Ackerman, L., Baumann, P., Potter, D., & Yoshida, M. (2015). Wh-filler-gap dependency formation guides reflexive antecedent search. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01504
  25. Fujita, H. (2021). On the parsing of garden-path sentences. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(10), 12341245. 10.1080/23273798.2021.1922727
  26. Fujita, H. (2023). Predictive structure building in language comprehension: A large sample study on incremental licensing and parallelism. Cognitive Processing, 24(2), 301311. 10.1007/s10339-023-01130-8
  27. Fujita, H. (2024a). Memory Retrieval in Online Sentence Parsing: Empirical Evidence, Computational Modelling, and Simulations. Computational Brain & Behavior, 7, 457478. 10.1007/s42113-024-00206-8
  28. Fujita, H. (2024b). Online revision process in clause-boundary garden-path sentences. Memory & Cognition, 52, 7390. 10.3758/s13421-023-01444-0
  29. Fujita, H. (2025a). Active dependency formation, maintenance cost and proactive retrieval interference. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 10.1080/23273798.2025.2522267
  30. Fujita, H. (2025b). The L-maze task and web-based data collection in second language sentence processing research. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, 4(3), 100251. 10.1016/j.rmal.2025.100251
  31. Fujita, H. (2026). Reassessing cumulative self-paced reading (SPR): Testing three variants shows cumulative SPR can be more useful than standard non-cumulative SPR for sentence-processing research, depending on presentation format. Behavior Research Methods, 58(7), 192. 10.3758/s13428-026-03044-7
  32. Fujita, H., & Cunnings, I. (2020). Reanalysis and lingering misinterpretation of linguistic dependencies in native and non-native sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 115, 104154. 10.1016/j.jml.2020.104154
  33. Fujita, H., & Cunnings, I. (2021). Reanalysis processes in non-native sentence comprehension. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(4), 628641. 10.1017/S1366728921000195
  34. Fujita, H., & Cunnings, I. (2022). Interference and filler-gap dependency formation in native and non-native language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(5), 702716. 10.1037/xlm0001134
  35. Fujita, H., & Cunnings, I. (2024). Subject-verb dependency formation and semantic interference in native and non-native language comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics, 45(1), 81109. 10.1017/S0142716423000498
  36. Fujita, H., & Yoshida, M. (2024). Online reflexive resolution and interference. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 39(4), 513526. 10.1080/23273798.2024.2329269
  37. Fujita, H., & Yoshida, M. (2026a). Active dependency formation and ambiguity resolution in real-time sentence processing. Memory & Cognition. 10.3758/s13421-026-01893-3
  38. Fujita, H., & Yoshida, M. (2026b). Real-time resolution of VP ellipsis ambiguity and processing depth. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 33(3), 95. 10.3758/s13423-026-02873-z
  39. Garnsey, S. M., Pearlmutter, N. J., Myers, E., & Lotocky, M. A. (1997). The Contributions of Verb Bias and Plausibility to the Comprehension of Temporarily Ambiguous Sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 37(1), 5893. 10.1006/jmla.1997.2512
  40. Gibson, E. (1991). A Computational Theory of Human Linguistic Processing: Memory Limitations and Processing Breakdown [PhD Thesis]. Carnegie Mellon University.
  41. Gibson, E., & Warren, T. (2004). Reading-Time Evidence for Intermediate Linguistic Structure in Long-Distance Dependencies. Syntax, 7(1), 5578. 10.1111/j.1368-0005.2004.00065.x
  42. Giskes, A., & Kush, D. (2021). Processing cataphors: Active antecedent search is persistent. Memory & Cognition, 49(7), 13701386. 10.3758/s13421-021-01176-z
  43. González Alonso, J., Cunnings, I., Fujita, H., Miller, D., & Rothman, J. (2021). Gender attraction in sentence comprehension. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 6(1), 20. 10.5334/gjgl.1300
  44. Gorrell, P. (1995). Syntax and Parsing. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core. 10.1017/CBO9780511627682
  45. Green, J. J. (2018). Adjunct Control: Syntax and processing [PhD Thesis]. University of Maryland.
  46. Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. Proceedings of NAACL, 2, 159166. 10.3115/1073336.1073357
  47. Hall, K., & Yoshida, M. (2021). Coreference and parallelism. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36(3), 296319. 10.1080/23273798.2020.1827154
  48. Holmes, V. M., Stowe, L., & Cupples, L. (1989). Lexical expectations in parsing complement-verb sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 28(6), 668689. 10.1016/0749-596X(89)90003-X
  49. Huang, K.-J., Arehalli, S., Kugemoto, M., Muxica, C., Prasad, G., Dillon, B., & Linzen, T. (2024). Large-scale benchmark yields no evidence that language model surprisal explains syntactic disambiguation difficulty. Journal of Memory and Language, 137, 104510. 10.1016/j.jml.2024.104510
  50. Jäger, L. A., Mertzen, D., Van Dyke, J. A., & Vasishth, S. (2020). Interference patterns in subject-verb agreement and reflexives revisited: A large-sample study. Journal of Memory and Language, 111, 104063. 10.1016/j.jml.2019.104063
  51. Kawasaki, N. (1993). Control and Arbitrary Interpretation in English [PhD Thesis]. University of Massachusetts.
  52. Kazanina, N., Lau, E. F., Lieberman, M., Yoshida, M., & Phillips, C. (2007). The effect of syntactic constraints on the processing of backwards anaphora. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(3), 384409. 10.1016/j.jml.2006.09.003
  53. Keine, S. (2020). Locality Domains in Syntax: Evidence from Sentence Processing. Syntax, 23(2), 105151. 10.1111/synt.12195
  54. Kennison, S. M. (2001). Limitations on the use of verb information during sentence comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(1), 132138. 10.3758/BF03196149
  55. Kush, D., Lidz, J., & Phillips, C. (2017). Looking forwards and backwards: The real-time processing of Strong and Weak Crossover. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2(1), 70. 10.5334/gjgl.280
  56. Landau, I. (2013). Control in Generative Grammar: A Research Companion. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core. 10.1017/CBO9781139061858
  57. Landau, I. (2021). A Selectional Theory of Adjunct Control. The MIT Press. 10.7551/mitpress/13925.001.0001
  58. Landau, I. (2025). Control. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Core. 10.1017/9781009243124
  59. Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106(3), 11261177. 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006
  60. Martin, R. (2001). Null Case and the Distribution of PRO. Linguistic Inquiry, 32(1), 141166. JSTOR. 10.1162/002438901554612
  61. McRae, K., & Matsuki, K. (2013). Constraint-based models of sentence processing. In Sentence processing. (pp. 5177). Psychology Press.
  62. McRae, K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Modeling the Influence of Thematic Fit (and Other Constraints) in On-line Sentence Comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 38(3), 283312. 10.1006/jmla.1997.2543
  63. Mitchell, D. C. (1987). Lexical guidance in human parsing: Locus and processing characteristics. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and Performance XII: The Psychology of Reading (pp. 601618). Erlbaum.
  64. Omaki, A., Lau, E. F., Davidson White, I., Dakan, M. L., Apple, A., & Phillips, C. (2015). Hyper-active gap filling. Frontiers in Psychology, 06. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00384
  65. Parker, D. (2019). Cue Combinatorics in Memory Retrieval for Anaphora. Cognitive Science, 43(3), e12715. 10.1111/cogs.12715
  66. Phillips, C. (2006). The Real-Time Status of Island Phenomena. Language, 82(4), 795823. 10.1353/lan.2006.0217
  67. Pickering, M. J., & Traxler, M. J. (1998). Plausibility and recovery from garden paths: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(4), 940961. 10.1037/0278-7393.24.4.940
  68. Pickering, M. J., & Traxler, M. J. (2003). Evidence against the use of subcategorisation frequency in the processing of unbounded dependencies. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18(4), 469503. 10.1080/01690960344000017
  69. Pickering, M. J., Traxler, M. J., & Crocker, M. W. (2000). Ambiguity Resolution in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Frequency-Based Accounts. Journal of Memory and Language, 43(3), 447475. 10.1006/jmla.2000.2708
  70. Pritchett, B. L. (1988). Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing. Language, 64(3), 539. 10.2307/414532
  71. Pritchett, B. L. (1992). Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance. University of Chicago Press.
  72. Qian, Z., Lee, E.-K., Lu, D. H.-Y., & Garnsey, S. M. (2019). Native and non-native (L1-Mandarin) speakers of English differ in online use of verb-based cues about sentence structure. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22(5), 897911. 10.1017/S1366728918001001
  73. R Core Team. (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
  74. Radford, A., Wu, J., Child, R., Luan, D., Amodei, D., & Sutskever, I. (2019). Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners.
  75. Rayner, K., & Frazier, L. (1987). Parsing temporarily ambiguous complements. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 39(4), 657673. 10.1080/14640748708401808
  76. Reed, L. A. (2014). Strengthening the PRO Hypothesis. De Gruyter Mouton. 10.1515/9781614510413
  77. Reinhart, T. (1976). The syntactic domain of anaphora [PhD Thesis]. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  78. Schmauder, A. R., & Egan, M. C. (1998). The influence of semantic fit on on-line sentence processing. Memory & Cognition, 26(6), 13041312. 10.3758/BF03201202
  79. Slattery, T. J., Sturt, P., Christianson, K., Yoshida, M., & Ferreira, F. (2013). Lingering misinterpretations of garden path sentences arise from competing syntactic representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(2), 104120. 10.1016/j.jml.2013.04.001
  80. Spivey-Knowlton, M. (1996). Integration of visual and linguistic information: Human data and model simulations [PhD Thesis]. University of Rochester.
  81. Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Resolving attachment ambiguities with multiple constraints. Cognition, 55(3), 227267. 10.1016/0010-0277(94)00647-4
  82. Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1998). Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Discourse: Modeling the Effects of Referential Context and Lexical Frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(6), 15211543. 10.1037/0278-7393.24.6.1521
  83. Sturt, P. (1997). Syntactic reanalysis in human language processing [PhD Thesis]. University of Edinburgh.
  84. Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(3), 542562. 10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00536-3
  85. Sturt, P., Pickering, M. J., & Crocker, M. W. (1999). Structural Change and Reanalysis Difficulty in Language Comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 40(1), 136150. 10.1006/jmla.1998.2606
  86. Tabor, W., & Hutchins, S. (2004). Evidence for Self-Organized Sentence Processing: Digging-In Effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(2), 431450. 10.1037/0278-7393.30.2.431
  87. Tabor, W., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1999). Dynamical Models of Sentence Processing. Cognitive Science, 23(4), 491515. 10.1207/s15516709cog2304_5
  88. Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M., & Hanna, J. E. (2000). Modeling thematic and discourse context effects with a multiple constraints approach: Implications for the architecture of the language comprehension system. In Architectures and mechanisms for language processing. (pp. 90118). Cambridge University Press. 10.1017/CBO9780511527210.005
  89. Traxler, M. J., & Pickering, M. J. (1996). Case-marking in the Parsing of Complement Sentences: Evidence from Eye Movements. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A(4), 9911004. 10.1080/713755674
  90. Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Kello, C. (1993). Verb-Specific Constraints in Sentence Processing: Separating Effects of Lexical Preference From Garden-Paths. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(3), 528553. 10.1037/0278-7393.19.3.528
  91. Truswell, R. (2014). Binding Theory. In A. Carnie, Y. Sato, & D. Siddiqi (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Syntax (Vol. 1, pp. 214238). Routledge.
  92. van Gompel, R. P. G., & Pickering, M. J. (2001). Lexical guidance in sentence processing: A note on Adams, Clifton, and Mitchell (1998). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8(4), 851857. 10.3758/BF03196228
  93. Vasishth, S., Mertzen, D., Jäger, L. A., & Gelman, A. (2018). The statistical significance filter leads to overoptimistic expectations of replicability. Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 151175. 10.1016/j.jml.2018.07.004
  94. Williams, E. (1992). Adjunct Control. In K. Larson R, S. Iatridou, U. Lahiri, & J. Higginbotham (Eds.), Control and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (Vol. 48, pp. 297322). Springer. 10.1007/978-94-015-7959-9_9
  95. Witzel, N., Witzel, J., & Forster, K. (2012). Comparisons of Online Reading Paradigms: Eye Tracking, Moving-Window, and Maze. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 41(2), 105128. 10.1007/s10936-011-9179-x
  96. Yoshida, M., Dickey, M. W., & Sturt, P. (2013). Predictive processing of syntactic structure: Sluicing and ellipsis in real-time sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(3), 272302. 10.1080/01690965.2011.622905
  97. Zehr, J., & Schwarz, F. (2018). PennController for Internet Based Experiments (IBEX) [Computer software]. 10.17605/OSF.IO/MD832
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.507 | Journal eISSN: 2514-4820
Language: English
Page range: 35 - 35
Submitted on: Nov 20, 2025
Accepted on: Jun 15, 2026
Published on: Jul 1, 2026
Published by: Ubiquity Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

© 2026 Hiroki Fujita, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.