Garden path sentence

1
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".Wikipedia:Citation needed
According to one current psycholinguistic theory, as a person reads a garden path sentence, the reader builds up a
structure of meaning one word at a time. At some point, it becomes clear to the reader that the next word or phrase
cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far; it is inconsistent with the path down which they have been
led. Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such
as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text. This phenomenon is
discussed at length by Stanley Fish in his book Surprised by Sin. He argues that incremental parsing of sentences
needs to be addressed by literary theorists. He also covers this topic in several essays from his book Is there a text in
this Class?.
Examples
Garden path sentences can be either simple or complex.
Simple
Garden-variety garden path sentences are puns employing antanaclasis: a word or phrase appears; it then reappears
and is initially understood as grammatical or rhetorical parallelism (usually in the form of an anaphora or
epistrophe); however, the rest of the sentence makes it clear that the second use must be different from the first.
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
A standard reader begins to put the first phrase together as two clichs, conveying the vague sense that "time
passes rather quickly". The concrete nature of fruit actually strengthens the imagery, producing a stronger
notion of an actual speeding arrow. The obviousness of fruit flying like a member of its class and the poor
aerodynamic properties of bananas, however, force a reppraisal: "fruit flies" goes from being its clause's
subject and verb to an adjective and its referent, "fruit flies"; "like" similarly goes from its meaning as a
marker of similes to its meaning as a verb. This new understanding can't apply to the first clause ("time flies"
not being a kind of fly), and the two phrases are recognized as unrelated. The expression's anaclastic nature is
recognized.
(For the classically minded, the first half also functions as a garden path sentence. "Time flies" is a traditional
English translation of the Latin proverb tempus fugit distilled from Vergil's fugit inreparbile tempus: "it flees,
irretrievable time". This confounding of the senses of "flee" and "fly" appears as early as Old English
[1]
but
Vergil's image is one of escape on foot. The use of an arrow in the simile, however, jerks such a reader back to
the airborne sense of flight.)
Another form of garden path sentence is paraprosdokian, where a second phrase can cause a renterpretation of
meaning:
"Mr. Chambers... the rest of the book... To Serve Man... it's a cookbook!"
[2]
Garden path sentence
2
Complex
The horse raced past the barn fell.
The reader usually starts to parse this as a basic noun phrase plus ordinary active intransitive verb plus "past
the barn", but stumbles when reaching the word "fell". At this point, the reader is forced to backtrack and look
for other possible structures. It may take some rereading to realize that "raced past the barn" is in fact a
reduced relative clause with a passive participle, implying that "fell" is the main verb. The correct reading is
then "The horse(that was) raced past the barnfell."
This sentence can be parsed in other ways as well: A British reader accustomed to "fell" being a noun
(meaning "mountain") may reach the end and still treat "raced" as the verb and "barn fell" as "the fell by or at
the barn". Fell is also an adjective that means "dreadful" or "wicked". Chiefly archaically and poetically,
adjectives may follow their noun leading to the somewhat nonsensical "The horse raced past the dreadful
barn."
The example hinges on the ambiguity of the lexical category of the word "raced": It can be either a past-tense
verb or a passive participle. Compare to an unambiguous sentence with the same syntactic structure: The car
driven past the barn crashed. Unlike "raced," the verb "driven" is unambiguously passive, thus eliminating the
garden path reading.
Other examples of garden path sentences are:Wikipedia:Citation needed
Sentence Initial likely partial parse Final parse
The old man the boat. The man, who is old... The boat is manned by the old.
The complex houses married and single
soldiers and their families.
The houses (meaning buildings or families), which
are complicated, got married to...
Single and married soldiers and their families
are housed in the complex.
The author wrote the novel was likely to be
a best-seller.
The author composed the novel... The author wrote that the novel was likely to
be a best-seller.
The government plans to raise taxes were
defeated.
The government is planning to raise taxes... The plans of the government to raise taxes
were defeated.
By language type
Garden path sentences mostly appear in analytic languages, where word order is heavily relied upon to establish the
grammatical case and function in a sentence. Fusional languages, which establish grammatical function in a sentence
through inflection and other types of relational synthesis mostly avoid this type of ambiguity because the relationship
of a word to the surrounding words is marked by the way the word is modified.
Parsing
When reading a sentence, readers will analyze the words and phrases they see and make inferences of the sentences
grammatical structure and meaning in a process called parsing. Generally, readers will parse the sentence chunks at a
time and will try to interpret the meaning of the sentence at each interval. As readers are given more information
they make an assumption of the contents and meaning of the whole sentence. With each new portion of the sentence
encountered, they will try to make that part make sense with the sentence structures that they have already
interpreted and their assumption about the rest of the sentence. The garden path sentence effect occurs when the
sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way, and when they
read the whole sentence there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected. The reader must then
read and evaluate the sentence again to understand its meaning. The sentence may be parsed and interpreted in
different ways due to the influence of pragmatics, semantics, or other factors describing the extralinguistic context.
[3]
Garden path sentence
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Parsing strategies
Various strategies can be used when parsing a sentence, and there is much debate over which parsing strategy
humans use. Differences in parsing strategies can be seen from the effects of a reader attempting to parse a part of a
sentence that is ambiguous in its syntax or meaning. For this reason, garden path sentences are often studied as a way
to test which strategy humans use. Two debated parsing strategies that humans are thought to use are serial and
parallel parsing.
Serial
Serial parsing means that the reader makes one interpretation of the ambiguity, and continues to parse the sentence in
the context of the interpretation. The reader will continue to use their initial interpretation as reference for future
parsing until disambiguating information is given.
Parallel
Parallel parsing means that the reader generates multiple interpretations of the sentence and stores them until
disambiguating information is given, at which point only the correct interpretation is maintained.
Re-analysis of a garden path sentence
When ambiguous nouns appear, they can function as both the object of the first item or the subject of the second
item. In that case the former use is preferred. It is also found out that the reanalysis of a garden path sentence gets
more and more difficult with the length of the ambiguous phrase.
[4]
Recovery strategies
A research paper published by Meseguer, Carreiras and Clifton (2002) stated that intensive eye movements are
observed when people are recovering from a mild garden path sentence. They proposed that people use two
strategies, both of which are consistent with the selective reanalysis process described by Frazier and Rayner in
1982. According to them, the readers predominantly use two alternative strategies to recover from mild garden path
sentences.
1. 1. The more common one includes the regression of eyes from the first disambiguation directly to the main verb of
the sentence. Then the readers reread the remaining of the sentence, fixating their eyes to the next region and the
adverb (the beginning of the ambiguous part of the sentence).
2. The second and least used strategy includes the regression from the first disambiguation directly to the adverb.
[5]
Partial reanalysis
Partial reanalysis occurs when analysis is not complete. Frequently, when people can make even a little bit of sense
of the later sentence, they stop analyzing further so the former part of the sentence still remains in memory and does
not get discarded from it.
Therefore, the original misinterpretation of the sentence remains even after the reanalysis is done; hence participants
final interpretations are often incorrect.
[6]
Brain processing in computation
One way to determine the brain processes involved is the use of brain electrophysiology. Brain electrophysiology is
used to study the impact of disfluenciesWikipedia:Please clarify in sentence processing by the brain, which
specifically use event related potentials (ERPs). ERPs are voltages generated by the brain that can be measured
through a device placed on the scalp. It is also observed that specific components of the ERPs can be associated with
the activation of different and specific linguistic processes of the brain.
[7]
Within ERPs, P600 is the most important
Garden path sentence
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component. Its activation occurs when the parser comes across a syntactic violation such as The broker persuaded to
sell the stock
[8]
or when parses synthesizes an unsatisfactory disambiguation on an ambiguous string of words such
as The Doctor Charged the patient was lying.
[9]
Hence the activation of P600 marks the parser's attempt to revise the
sentence's structural mis-match or ambiguity. However it is also observed that the activation of P600 may be low or
completely absent if the parser is asked to pay attention only to the semantic aspects of a sentence either through an
explicit instruction
[10]
or through the use of specific words as a way to force a semantic analysis of the sentence.
[11]
The result of yet another study conducted by Osterhout in 1997 reveal that the activation of P600 varies with the
parser's own attentions to the syntactic violations of the sentence.
[12]
The effects of disfluency
Disfluent sentences have a direct effect on the way a sentence structure is built in the parser's mind. Depending on its
location within a sentence, a disfluency either aids in the computation of a sentence or forces the parser to linger on
the sentence for a longer period of time. It is observed that the more an individual lingers on an incorrect parse, the
more it is likely that the sentence will end up being interpreted incorrectly. There also appearsWikipedia:Please
clarify that the presence of a disfluency in a sentence - caused by filled and long silent parses - does not elicit the
P600. Instead they elicit another ERP component, N400, which gets activated when people try to integrate a new
word into the preceding sentence's context.
References
[1] Oxford English Dictionary, 1sted. " fly, v. (http:/ / www. oed. com/ view/ Entry/ 71387#eid4064666)". Oxford University Press (Oxford),
1896.
[2] Rod Sterling. The Twilight Zone. "To Serve Man". CBS, 1962.
[3] Reisberg, D. (2010). Cognition: Exploring the science of the mind. (4 ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
[4] Ferreria, F., & M Henderson, J. (1991). Recovery from misanalyses of garden-path sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(6),
725-745.
[5] Meseguer, E., Carreiras, M., & Clifton, C. (2002). Overt reanalysis strategies and eye movements during the reading of mild garden path
sentences. Published in partnership with the Psychonomic Society, 30(4), 551-561.
[6] Patson, N. D., Darowski, E. S., Moon, N., & Ferreria, F. (2009). Lingering misinterpretations in garden-path sentences: Evidence from a
paraphrasing task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35(1), 280-285.
[7] Osterhout, L., McLaughlin, J., Kim, A., Greenwald, R., & Inoue, K. (2004). Sentences in the brain: Event-related potentials as real-time
reflects of sentence comprehension and language learning. In M. Carreiras & C. Clifton, Jr. (Eds.), The on-line study of sentence
comprehension: Eyetracking ERP and beyond. Psychology Press.
[8] Osterhout, L., & Holcomb, P. (1992). Event-related brain potentials elicited by syntactic anomaly. Journal of Memory and Language, 31,
785 804.
[9] Osterhout, L., Holcomb, P. J., & Swinney, D. A. (1994). Brain potentials elicited by garden-path sentences: Evidence of the application of
verb information during parsing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20,786 803.
[10] Hahne, A., & Friederici, A. D. (2002). Differential task effects on semantic and syntactic processes as revealed by ERPs. Cognitive Brain
Research, 13, 339 356.
[11] Gunter, T. C., Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (2000). Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late
interaction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 556 568.
[12] Osterhout, L. (1997). On the brain response to syntactic anomalies: Manipulations of word position and word class reveal individual
differences. Brain & Language, 59, 494 522.
Garden path sentence
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External links
Misinterpretations of Garden-Path Sentences: Implications for Models of Sentence Processing and Reanalysis
(PDF) (http:/ / www. psychology. uiowa. edu/ faculty/ hollingworth/ documents/ Ferreira_etal_2001. pdf)
The Trouble with NLP (http:/ / specgram. com/ CLIII. 4/ 08. phlogiston. cartoon. zhe. html): Some additional
demonstrations of why these and similar examples are hard for computers to deal with when attempting natural
language processing.
Garden path sentences mentioned in (http:/ / www. qwantz. com/ index. php?comic=204) Dinosaur Comics.
Human Sentence Processing (http:/ / sites. google. com/ site/ sentenceprocessing): an introductory website on the
computational psycholinguistic aspects of human sentence processing, developed for students in Linguistics,
Psychology or Computer Science.
Article Sources and Contributors
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Article Sources and Contributors
Garden path sentence Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=611354953 Contributors: Acthompson, Alex Barrett, Altenmann, AndrewWTaylor, Andycjp, Angelastic,
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