garden-path

A garden-path is a psycholinguistic phenomenon wherein a sentence's early syntactic structure strongly invites one parse, and later words contradict that parse, forcing the reader or listener to abandon the initial analysis and reanalyse from the point of ambiguity. The concept applies at three levels: (1) lexical ambiguity (e.g. 'The horse raced past the barn fell' — 'raced' initially read as main verb), (2) structural ambiguity (e.g. 'While Mary eaten the cake...' — 'eaten' initially read as main verb), and (3) phrase-level ambiguity (e.g. prepositional-phrase attachment). It persists as a theoretical construct in linguistics, experimental psychology, and natural-language processing, sustained through corpus studies, acceptability-judgment tasks, reading-time measurements, and computational parser benchmarks. The phenomenon is not in the text but in the interaction between text structure and human parsing strategy. [formal: garden-path effect | substrate: mind | horizon: generations | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]