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Psycholinguistics Syntax Linguistics

The Horse Raced Past the Barn Fell: Parsing Garden-Path Sentences

Estimated read time 6 min read

Read this sentence: “The horse raced past the barn fell.” If you had to read it twice, your brain just fell for a classic “garden-path” sentence, a grammatical illusion designed to exploit how we process language in real-time. This article explores the fascinating psycholinguistic reasons why these sentences trick us and what they reveal about the predictive magic of our internal grammar.