Garden Path Effect

The garden path effect is a phenomenon in sentence comprehension in which a reader or listener initially parses a syntactically ambiguous sentence in a way that seems most natural at first, only to reach a later word that is incompatible with that reading, forcing the sentence to be mentally reanalyzed under a different structure. A classic example is the sentence The horse raced past the barn fell, which most readers initially misparse with raced as the sentence's main verb, only to stumble at the word fell and have to reinterpret raced past the barn as a reduced relative clause describing the horse. The psycholinguist Thomas Bever is credited with introducing such garden path sentences into the study of sentence processing around 1970, using them as evidence that human sentence comprehension proceeds incrementally, committing to a structural interpretation word by word rather than waiting to consider the whole sentence at once. Researchers have proposed various parsing strategies to explain which initial reading the mind favors when a sentence is ambiguous, generally converging on the idea that the parser prefers the simplest, most immediately available structure, which is exactly what produces a garden path when that simple structure later turns out to be wrong. The effect remains a central piece of evidence in psycholinguistics for how sentence processing unfolds in real time rather than only after a sentence is complete.