Garden paths
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P165
2025-11-09
38
Garden paths
Observations such as the two above – that sentence constituents tend to get packaged up as we read a sentence and that we have preferred ways of packaging – have led to an account of sentence processing that is nicely illustrated with garden path sentences. A garden path sentence is one which leads the reader/listener up the garden path’ by initially inducing an interpretation which turns out to be incorrect. Typically, garden path sentences involve a misleading syntactic analysis.
The example in (10.37) is a famous one in the garden path literature and comes from Bever (1970). Many people struggle for some time to work out what it means, or even that it is a well-formed sentence in English. Adding some explicit syntactic markers, as in 10.38, can help readers reach the intended meaning.
When confronted by the sentence in (10.37), most readers initially prefer to interpret ae as a past tense verb, and to understand ae as a s e a as what the horse did. It then becomes difficult to build ell into that interpretation, and so a revision is necessary. A successful revision will result in raced past the barn being interpreted as a relative clause, with ae as a participle rather than a past tense verb. This relative clause reading is made clear by as in 10.38. Because these words are missing from (10.37), this sentence is said to contain a reduced relative. The ambiguity in (10.37) is possible because the verb race has the same form (raced) for the past tense and the past participle. The same ambiguity would not arise for a verb like drive, which has the past tense form drove and the past participle driven, and so The car driven past the barn … could only be interpreted as a reduced relative structure.
Other interpretations of example 10.37 have been suggested, and these either involve different understanding of the meanings of one or more words (e.g. of fell as meaning a type of hill, as in fell, and of a ell as therefore a type of fell or the name of a particular fell), or require some additional punctuation, e.g. a semicolon after past (The horse raced past; the barn fell). It is interesting that both of these suggestions follow the stated preference of interpreting ae as a past tense verb.
Garden-path type sentences are not hard to find in everyday life. The following are examples from newspaper headlines:
The removal of grammatical information such as function words in news paper headlines does of course add to the level of ambiguity by removing explicit markers of syntax which, as we have already seen, make an important contribution to comprehension.
One account for the garden path experience has been called the sausage machine Frazier Fodor, 1978. The name derives from the way the human sentence processor packages the input words into strings of phrases much as a machine manufacturing sausages packages the con tents into strings of sausages. The sausage machine is a parser, i.e. it analyses sentences according to their syntactic structure. The parser is driven by some key principles, including the following. First, the goal of its operations is to build a syntactic tree, also known as a phrase marker. It does this by including each word in turn as it is encountered (i.e. read or heard). Second, the parser is deterministic. This means that it can only build one tree at a time. It can therefore be contrasted with parallel processing models in which multiple interpretations can be entertained at the same time. Third, the sausage machine parser tries to keep the syntax as simple as possible. It also tries not to leave too much material unattached, i.e. not built into the syntactic tree under construction.
Late Closure and Minimal Attachment
Two parsing strategies are proposed to help the parser meet these criteria. These are La te Closure (10.40) and Minimal attachment (10.41).
These strategies are best explained through examples. Consider the possible analyses of the sequence Before the police stopped the driver in (10.42) and (10.43), as shown in the syntactic tree structures below each example.
When it gets to the driver, the sausage machine (i.e., it is argued, the reader) prefers the interpretation represented by the tree structure in (10.42) because – obeying the principle of Late Closure in (10.40) – this NP is added to the current constituent, as the object of the V (stopped) inside the VP. This corresponds to a transitive reading of the verb stopped, with the driver as its object. In (10.43) stopped is being used intransitively, i.e. with no explicit object. In this case the first clause is closed early, after stopped, and the driver is the subject of the second clause (… was getting nervous).
Consider now the sequence Karen new the schedule in (10.44) and (10.45). We see that it too has two interpretations, as shown in the different syn tactic analyses of the same string of words. In both analyses the schedule is attached within the VP that was started with knew, i.e. Late Closure is being followed. In (10.44), the NP the schedule is the direct object and is attached to the verb phrase using no new nodes. That is, there are no syn tactic nodes between this NP and the VP. The NP is said to be minimally attached. However, in (10.45) an intervening S (sentence/clause) node needs to be posited. This is because the schedule is now not the simple object of knew. Rather, it is the subject of a subordinate clause, the schedule was wrong, and it is this complete clause that is the object of knew. The tree diagram shows the additional S node required between the highest VP and the NP the schedule for (10.45), indicating the noo -minimal attachment of that NP into the tree.
The evidence for these processing strategies comes from garden path experiences. These experiences can be measured in eye-tracking experiments that record participants’ eye movements as they read (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Rayner & Frazier, 1987). If a participant is reading a sentence like 10.43, then when they reach the word as their gaze lingers on that word, and they show regressions backtracking, or backwards eye movements to earlier parts of the sentence. This does not happen when they reach the word in the equivalent position (he) in (10.42). The preference according to Late Closure is for driver to be the object of stopped, and this analysis is pursued in both sentences. Such an analysis becomes problematic in (10.43) once the word as is encountered, because this signals that the driver should be interpreted as the subject of the second clause and so e is being used intransitively, i.e. the police stopped themselves, not someone else. Similar findings apply to Minimal Attachment ambiguities, such as (10.44)–(10.45).
Consider now the sentence in (10.46). Does this sentence mean that Sam figured out that Max wanted to take the book, or does it mean that Max wanted to take out the book, and that is what Sam figured?
Earlier in the chapter we considered a similar example with the discontinuous constituent rang … up. The more material that intervenes between the two parts, the more difficult the sentence is to process. This is reflected in a preference for interpreting 10.46 with the second of the meanings given above, i.e. that Max wanted to take the book out. That interpretation has out belonging to take, with two intervening words or one intervening NP constituent, rather than to figured, with seven intervening words and a string of intervening constituents. These attachments are illustrated in (10.47).
The preference follows a principle called Right Association (Kimball, 1973), which states that new nodes are preferentially attached to the lowest node if the strategies of Late Closure and Minimal Attachment do not indicate otherwise. This is shown by the lower of the two dashed connecting lines in (10.47).
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