Reanalysis in Sentence Processing : Rebuilding or Repair?

Abstract

This paper concerns the distinction between rebuilding and repair in the process of reanalysis in sentence processing. Fodor and Inoue (1994, 2000) propose that recovery from garden paths is repair rather than rebuilding, and that the difficulty of repair is tied to the cost of diagnosing the error in the first-pass processing. While the diagnosis model in Fodor and Inoue (1994, 2000) can account for a reasonable range of garden path phenomena, it is questionable whether its operating principles can apply in a consistent way. In particular, it doesn't seem clear why lexical reaccess is not possible in certain cases and the diagnosis of the error in those cases fails. Meanwhile, the rebuilding mechanism of a parser based on structural determinism consistently distinguishes between conscious and unconscious reanalyses by considering the structural configurations in the reanalysis procedures. Provided that both rebuilding and repair mechanism show comparable empirical coverage, the former is more desirable due to its conceptual adequacy and consistency.