"The old man the boat."
"The horse raced past the barn fell."
"The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families."
Did you have to re-read those sentences? I definitely did! They are known as Garden Path sentences, because they guide you towards a certain interpretation like a path in a garden would, the only thing is that it usually takes you to interpreting it incorrectly.
The psycholinguistic explanation
To understand how this phenomenon occurs, we need to understand what parsing means in psycholinguistics. Parsing refers to the process our minds go through to analyse sentences in real time to figure out what they mean, this includes using working memory and identifying words as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so on.
When you read a garden path sentence, what is actually happening is that your brain starts parsing the sentence, and it makes a statistical prediction of what most likely comes next. As you keep reading, you realise that the prediction was not correct, creating a moment of confusion that makes you want to read the sentence again to see what you have missed.
Psycholinguists have suggested that when we parse sentences, the brain follows certain strategies. Two of the most well-known are late closure and minimal attachment.
Late closure
Late closure means that when the brain comes across a new word, it tends to attach it to the phrase that is already being processed, as opposed to interpreting it as the start of a new clause. It basically tries to keep the current structure going instead of opening a new one.
Minimal attachment
Minimal attachment refers to the fact that the brain prefers the simplest possible grammatical structure. So when there are several ways to interpret a sentence, it initially chooses the structure that has the least syntactic complexity.
These strategies are generally very useful because they let us process language in a quick and effective way. However, when it comes to garden path sentences, the initial interpretation that the brain makes before you finish reading the sentence is eventually proven wrong.
Garden path examples
Here are six common garden path examples. In each case, the sentence is grammatically correct, but the reader is initially led toward the wrong interpretation.
| Garden path sentence | Where the confusion lies | What it really means |
|---|---|---|
| The old man the boat. | "man" is first read as a noun instead of a verb. | The old people operate the boat. |
| The horse raced past the barn fell. | "raced past the barn" is first read as the main verb instead of a reduced relative clause. | The horse that was raced past the barn fell. |
| Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him. | "a mile" is first read as the object of "jogs" instead of the subject of a new clause. | Since Jay always jogs, a mile seems like a short distance to him. |
| The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. | "clothing is made of" is first read as the main clause. | The cotton that clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. |
| Fat people eat accumulates. | "eat" is first read as the main verb instead of part of a noun phrase. | The fat that people eat accumulates. |
| The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. | "complex" is first read as an adjective instead of a noun. | The housing complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. |
Conclusion
Garden path sentences are interesting because they expose how we normally process language. As we have seen, when we read a sentence we start decoding its meaning straight away, even before we finish reading, which means that part of the information we process is temporarily just a prediction.
Do you know any other garden path sentences? I would love to hear some new ones! Feel free to let me know on Blue Sky.