Garden-path

Therefore, a sentence with an initial gap, such as Who asked Meg to persuade Jill to inform Ted that Bob had spoken to Tom?, would garden path an active parser just as often as (17) would, and both sentences would be considerably more troublesome to an active parser than to a passive one.

We anticipated that the reader would be garden-pathed immediately on encountering the disambiguating verb of a sentence like (3).

Specifically, if the parsing model incorporates a property that permits delay, why doesn't this property insure that the parser will never be garden-pathed?

‘Mitty’ owes much of its interest to violating this rule in its opening pages, deliberately ‘garden-pathing’ the reader into mistaking Mitty’s fantasy world for his actual world (as, apparently, Mitty himself is inclined to do).

Additionally, the GP sentences were read significantly more slowly than correspondingly NGP controls, as showed in Fig. 2, below, since these BP complex structures are parsed by following Late Closure and thus garden pathed the subjects (see Ribeiro, 2005).

The participants were more easily garden pathed to the interpretation of The teachers as the doer (or agent) of “taught,” which led them to make the judgment that the sentence beginning with The teachers did not make sense.