Parsing temporarily ambiguous complements

Holmes, Kennedy and Murray (1987) recently claimed that the empirical support for the Minimal Attachment Strategy of sentence parsing had been weakened by results they reported. They found that reading time for an ambiguous string of words did not decrease when it was preceded by an overt complementizer, which should have disambiguated it. Thus, they suggested that results that we (Frazier and Rayner, 1982) earlier attributed to Minimal Attachment were not due to “garden-path” effects, but rather reflected the extra complexity caused by having to process two sets of clausal relations instead of just one. In the present experiment, we replicated their experiment using eye movement data rather than the subject-paced reading task they used. We found that readers processed Nonminimal Attachment sentences with overt complementizers considerably faster than those without a complementizer. Our results showed that the complexity of Nonminimal Attachment sentences cannot be attributed to their clausal status per se. Differences between the tasks that might contribute to the different pattern of results across the experiments are discussed.