Editing Syntactic ambiguity (section)

=== Low reading span vs. high reading span adults ===
For low [[Reading span task|reading span]] adults who had the worst verbal working memory, they took longer to process the sentences with the [[reduced relative clause]] compared to the [[relative clause]] and had similar times from [[Animacy|inanimate or animate subjects]]. For high reading span subjects who had the best verbal working memory, they were overall faster than the low reading span subjects. Within the high reading span subjects, however, they responded faster to inanimate subjects and took longer to respond to animate subjects. This was because the animate subjects had a greater propensity to create a [[Garden-path sentence|garden path sentence]] ''because of'' (not despite) greater verbal working memory. This suggested that since the low reading span subjects had less cognitive resources, only syntactic cues could be processed while high reading span subjects had more cognitive resources and could thus get tripped up with the garden path sentence.<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Ferreira|first1=Fernanda|last2=Clifton|first2=Charles|date=1986-06-01|title=The independence of syntactic processing|journal=Journal of Memory and Language|volume=25|issue=3|pages=348–368|doi=10.1016/0749-596X(86)90006-9|issn=0749-596X}}</ref>