gardenpath

A garden-path sentence is a sentence that leads the reader to adopt an initial syntactic interpretation that turns out to be incorrect when later information is encountered. The term draws on the metaphor of being led down a garden path and realizing you have been misled. Garden-path sentences are a standard tool in psycholinguistics for studying real-time sentence processing and ambiguity resolution.

Typical examples show how initial parsing can mislead: "The old man the boats" can be read as "The old man" with "man" as a noun, but the intended parse is "The old [people] man the boats," where "man" is a verb. Another classic is "The horse raced past the barn fell"—read as "The horse raced past the barn" until "fell" forces reanalysis.

Mechanisms: The garden-path effect arises when the parser selects a syntactic structure that is plausible but incompatible with the rest of the sentence. Strategies such as late closure (attaching new material to the current phrase) and minimal attachment (the simplest structure) can lead to misinterpretation, requiring reanalysis.

Research and theories: Garden-path effects are studied with reading-time experiments, eye-tracking, and ERP to understand real-time processing. The term contrasts the classic garden-path model with newer constraint-based or probabilistic approaches that allow semantics and context to influence initial interpretation.

Usage: The concept remains central in discussions of incremental language comprehension and why some ambiguities are harder to resolve than others.