The Lingering Effect as Memory Persistence Has Distinct Predictors from the Garden-path Effect

We investigated the mechanism of the lingering effect in relation to the garden-path effect based on self-paced reading and comprehension experiments in Japanese, which shows higher reanalysis success rates than English does. The lingering effect is a phenomenon whereby an initial misinterpretation persists in the final comprehension even after disambiguation. Through self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and comprehension tasks (Experiments 2 and 3), this study explored how the length and head position of ambiguous regions influence the garden-path and lingering effects. Our results indicate that the length and head position influenced the garden-path and lingering effects in different ways. In particular, a longer initial misparse strengthened the garden-path effect in a linear manner but weakened the lingering effect in a non-linear manner. Additionally, Surprisal affected the garden-path effect, but not the lingering effect. These results support the notion that the garden-path and lingering effects are correlated but operate through different underlying processes. Specifically, the garden-path effect pertains to parsing, whereas the lingering effect relates to short-term memory.