The result is that some ungrammatical sentences have lower processing cost and higher acceptability than some complex grammatical sentences: with doubly nested relative clauses, for instance, subjects rate ungrammatical sentence (1) as more acceptable than sentence (2), forgetting about the VP predicted by the second noun (Gibson and Thomas, 1999).
the surprisal-mitigating effect of a context element on a word w i decreases as that element gets farther from w i .