Investigating processing failure : the case of garden path sentences

Abstract

Unlike other models of utterance interpretation, the cognitively-grounded model proposed by SPERBER and WILSON (1995), known as the relevance theory, claims to offer tools which can be applied to the investigation of utterance comprehension not only at the context-sensitive pragmatic level of drawing inferences from available inputs but also at the subpragmatic level of linguistic decoding. In this paper I will report on an empirical study conducted to determine what insights the model can reveal about the nature of the cognitive processes responsible for the recovery of linguistically encoded meanings and how well it can account for the processing failure caused by linguistic rather than pragmatic factors.