@inproceedings{baitalik-datta-2026-garden,
    title = "Garden Path Recovery in Causal and Masked Language Models",
    author = "Baitalik, Sanjan  and
      Datta, Rajashik",
    editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh  and
      Rodriguez, Juan Diego  and
      de Gibert, Ona",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.32/",
    pages = "383--392",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-393-7",
    abstract = "Garden-path sentences offer a controlled probe of English incremental sentence processing because they require a reader to revise an initially plausible parse when a later region disambiguates the structure. We present an architecture-aware comparison of garden-path recovery in causal and masked language models using 100 English garden-path/control pairs (200 sentences) spanning three constructions: NP/Z, where a noun phrase is initially read as a direct object but must be reanalyzed as the subject of a zero-complement clause; NP/S, where a noun phrase must be reanalyzed as the subject of an embedded sentence; and MV/RR, where an apparent main verb must be reanalyzed as a reduced relative modifier. Causal models are evaluated with left-to-right word surprisal, whereas masked models are evaluated with pseudo-surprisal derived from masked language model scoring. Beyond the disambiguating word, we analyze cumulative excess surprisal, area-under-curve recovery summaries, and layer-wise hidden-state divergence between each garden-path sentence and its minimally different control. Across the audit-valid model set, causal models show larger within-model disambiguation effects than masked models overall, with the clearest family-level difference on NP/Z constructions. We interpret this difference cautiously because surprisal and pseudo-surprisal are not numerically commensurable across architectures or tokenizers. The results nevertheless show that architecture changes which recovery signals are observable: decoder-only models exhibit sharper online disruption at the point of syntactic revision, while bidirectional encoders appear comparatively buffered at the disambiguator due to right-context access. More broadly, the findings argue that garden-path evaluation should emphasize recovery dynamics, not merely end-state plausibility or task accuracy."
}