@inproceedings{clark-etal-2026-readers,
    title = "Readers make targeted regressions to plausible errors in reanalysis of ``noisy-channel garden-path'' sentences",
    author = "Clark, Thomas Hikaru  and
      Levy, Roger P.  and
      Gibson, Edward",
    editor = "Bonial, Claire  and
      Berzak, Yevgeni",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.conll-main.25/",
    pages = "435--451",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-410-1",
    abstract = "A key question in psycholinguistics is how inferences about the meaning of linguistic input unfold incrementally a comprehender{'}s mind. In this work, we study reading dynamics for ``noisy-channel garden-path'' sentences, which temporarily appear well-formed but feature late-appearing violations of expectation that can be resolved not by inferring an alternative syntactic structure, but by inferring the presence of an error. We find evidence for targeted regressions {--} eye movements towards regions that are promising loci of possible errors in light of later-arriving information, showing patterns consistent with the posterior inferences of a model of noisy-channel processing with reanalysis. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of noisy-channel language comprehension and information-theoretic explanations of reading dynamics."
}