The horse raced past the barn fell. Huh? If this sentence is confusing – you are not alone!

This is a classic example of a “garden-path sentence,” one that is grammatically correct but leads you down the wrong “path” as you read it. The term “garden-path” refers to the saying “to be led down the garden path,” which means to be deceived or tricked.

In the sentence “The horse raced past the barn fell,” our brains read the first three words “The horse raced” and assume “horse” is the subject and “raced” is the active verb. But when we hit the word “fell,” the sentence no longer makes sense.

Time to turn around and head back to find the correct path! It turns out “fell” is the active verb, and “raced paced the barn” is an adjectival phrase for “horse.” Adding two commas helps read this sentence accurately: “The horse, raced past the barn, fell.”

The extra time needed to read the sentence without those helpful commas, vs. with them, was coined the “garden-path effect” by Thomas G. Bever, professor of Linguistics, Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona.

Here are some garden-path sentences for you to ponder:

• The old man the boat.
• The woman gave the child the dog bit a bandaid.
• I convinced her children are noisy.
• The raft floated down the river sank. 
• We painted the wall with cracks.

These sentences falsely lead the reader toward the expected meaning but it is not the one the writer intended. When a reader encounters a garden-path sentence, they take more time to determine the correct interpretation. In linguistics, this process is called “disambiguation” of a sentence that is “syntactically ambiguous.”

I will leave you with one more sentence to keep you thinking…

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like banana.

Read more:

Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structure. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley.

Kiel Christianson, Jack Dempsey, Anna Tsiola, Sarah-Elizabeth M. Deshaies, Nayoung Kim, Retracing the garden-path: Nonselective rereading and no reanalysis, Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 137, 2024, 104515, ISSN 0749-596X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104515.