GARDENPATHSENTENCE

Garden path sentence

A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end. Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate the fact that when human beings read, they process language one word at a time. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down the garden path", meaning "to be misled".

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garden path sentence

Noun

  1. A sentence that is easily parsed incorrectly when first read, due to ambiguity of a word or words.


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: garden path sentence
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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