Interpretation of ungrammatical sentences

Ungrammatical Hebrew sentences were presented to subjects who were required to interpret them. The sentences contained violations of agreement rules concerning number (as in the English The girl sing), gender, number and gender, and tense. In simple cases only one constituent had to be changed in order to form a grammatical sentence; in more complicated sentences this number was up to three. The interpretations subjects made of these sentences were found to follow syntactic, morphophonemic, semantic, pragmatic, and heuristic considerations. Syntactic rules were found to be relevant mainly in the simple sentences. In the complicated cases the interpretations given were those which required changing the least number of surface constituents in order to make the sentence grammatical. In addition, marked constituents showed a resistance to change, and the order of constituents was not relevant.