On the garden path

Abstract

This study presents the theory that language comprehension involves analyzing sentences into phonological structures, syntactic structures, and semantic structures. The interaction between the three levels of linguistic representation accounts for four stages of parsing: (a) &phis;-phrasing (i.e., combining words into phonological phrases), (b) attachment (i.e., attaching a phrase to an existing structure), (c) thematic interpretation (i.e., interpreting thematic relations), and (d) clausal analysis (i.e., processing a sentence clause by clause). Syntactic ambiguities are resolved through the four stages of parsing. This theory explains why some locally ambiguous sentences cause garden path effects whereas others do not and why some globally ambiguous sentences cause pun effects whereas others do not.