Reading longer does not help: Reaction times predict general comprehension but not garden-path recovery

Comprehenders often retain incorrect interpretations of garden-path sentences, suggesting that sentence representations are not always fully revised after misanalysis. A common assumption is that the additional processing time observed at disambiguation reflects effortful syntactic repair and should therefore improve final interpretations. We tested this prediction by examining whether reaction times predict successful recovery from misanalysis. Participants read ambiguous and unambiguous sentences in a self-paced reading task and answered comprehension questions probing four components of interpretation: inhibition of the initial misanalysis of the ambiguous region, finding the correct interpretation of the ambiguous region, and correct and incorrect interpretations of the disambiguating region. RTs were analyzed at the disambiguating, spillover, and sentence-final regions. Garden-path sentences produced robust processing slowdowns and reduced comprehension accuracy. However, longer RTs did not increase the likelihood of obtaining the correct interpretation. Slower reading improved accuracy for unambiguous sentences, but it had no effect in garden-path sentences. The same pattern (with the effect being present in the unambiguous, but not in the ambiguous condition) was found even in sentence regions unrelated to reanalysis. Critically, for the correct interpretation of the ambiguous region and the inhibition of the initial misanalysis, processing time had no effect in garden-path sentences: readers either recovered the intended analysis or retained a misinterpretation regardless of how long they processed the input. These findings challenge the assumption that processing slowdowns index successful syntactic revision and instead suggest that reanalysis outcomes are largely time-independent, reflecting whether a viable alternative interpretation is found rather than how long readers process the disambiguating input.