garden-path sentences

A term used in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS for sentences which, viewed from left to right one word at a time, mislead the listener/reader into an interpretation which later information in the sentence shows to be incorrect. We have been ‘led up the garden path’. A much-cited example is The horse raced past the barn fell. This sentence has to be reanalyzed when fell forces us to take raced not as a main-clause verb but as an elliptical RELATIVE clause (‘that was raced’). The study of such sentences provides insights into the way the brain processes language.