Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate that human beings process language one word at a time.
The classic example is:
- "The horse raced past the barn fell."
- "The horse (that was raced past the barn [by someone that is not the horse itself]) fell."
- "The food eaten on the train was good."
Natural language parsing
The Garden Path effect presents a challenge for computational linguistics, because parsers typically require whole sentences or clauses to analyse. The incremental processing that humans demonstrate could require some changes in the parsers and/or the grammars they use. On the other hand, this effect could also provide hints about how to cope with natural language ambiguity.