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{
    "pk": 1484,
    "title": "Beware of referential garden paths! The dangerous allure of semantic parses that succeed locally but globally fail",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "<p>A central endeavor in psycholinguistic research has been to determine the processing profile of syntactically ambiguous strings. Previous work investigating syntactic attachment ambiguities has shown that discarding a locally grammatically available, but globally failing, parse is costly. However, little is known about how comprehenders cope with <em>semantic</em> parsing ambiguities. Using the case study of scopally ambiguous definite descriptions such as <em>the rabbit in the big hat</em>, we examine whether comparable penalties arise for non-lexical semantic ambiguities. In a series of reference resolution tasks, we find dispreference for strings that are globally defined but fail to refer under alternative semantic parses, compared to strings where all readings successfully refer to the same individual. Crucially, this effect is only detectable when the alternative failing reading gives rise to a REFERENTIAL GARDEN PATH, where a dynamic constraint evaluation process temporarily settles on a unique referent before eventually failing. We conclude that failing alternative readings cause dispreference for a definite description, but only when the failing interpretation constitutes a red herring.</p>",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "Regular Article",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87v9q353",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Helena",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Aparicio",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Cornell University",
            "department": "Linguistics"
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Roger",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Levy",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": "BCS"
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Elizabeth",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Coppock",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Boston University",
            "department": "Linguistics"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2023-07-02T14:36:17.721000Z",
    "date_accepted": "2024-09-17T15:21:44.022000Z",
    "date_published": "2025-01-13T14:01:00Z",
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