word
garden path sentence
GAR-den PATH SEN-tents
ˈɡɑːrdən pæθ ˈsɛntənsListen
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Syllable breakdown
gardenpathsentence
Dictionary meaning
a sentence that leads the reader or listener to an initial incorrect interpretation before requiring reanalysis when the true grammatical structure becomes clear; for example, 'The horse raced past the barn fell'; used in psycholinguistics to study how the parser processes syntax incrementally and recovers from mistakes
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