The Garden Path Effect Essay Example
Monica Beasley
The garden path effect
Class: Cognitive psychology
Professor: Linda A Gullatte
One of the most important personalities in the cognitive psychology who studied the garden path effect is Lyn Frazier who is a Linguistics professor at the University of Massachusetts. His garden path model of syntactic parsing influenced many linguists in their studies about the lexical and syntactical ambiguity in our language. In his book “The sausage machine”, Frasier claims that the longer a sentence, the more grammatical rules needed to be applied. With each word added to a simple phrase, the structure of the sentence becomes more complicated and more time is spent in trying to understand the meaning of it. The smaller the sentence, the easier to comprehend it since the numbers of grammatical rules are limited. The garden path is a metaphor intended to compare the maze in a garden path with how difficult a sentence can be to understand if many word and ideas are added to one sentence and not explained clearly. In order to comprehend the content of a text, different cognitive processes are involved. One of them is the lexical analysis where the contextual the meaning of the words is analyzed. The other process is the syntactic parsing that analyses the grammatical structure of words and phrases in a sentence and determines what semantic ideas where expressed in that context. These cognitive processes play a big role in the comprehension of the garden path effects in our language. The garden path effect is the misleading, the misunderstanding, the ambiguity found in a sentence that has more than one meaning. This concept is assimilated with a maze where you get lost, you are mislead until you find the right outlet. Many times this event can be frustrating because of the ambiguity and the uncertainty we feel on our way to find the right meaning of a sentence. The way our brain works is whenever we hear someone talking or when we read
The garden path effect
Class: Cognitive psychology
Professor: Linda A Gullatte
One of the most important personalities in the cognitive psychology who studied the garden path effect is Lyn Frazier who is a Linguistics professor at the University of Massachusetts. His garden path model of syntactic parsing influenced many linguists in their studies about the lexical and syntactical ambiguity in our language. In his book “The sausage machine”, Frasier claims that the longer a sentence, the more grammatical rules needed to be applied. With each word added to a simple phrase, the structure of the sentence becomes more complicated and more time is spent in trying to understand the meaning of it. The smaller the sentence, the easier to comprehend it since the numbers of grammatical rules are limited. The garden path is a metaphor intended to compare the maze in a garden path with how difficult a sentence can be to understand if many word and ideas are added to one sentence and not explained clearly. In order to comprehend the content of a text, different cognitive processes are involved. One of them is the lexical analysis where the contextual the meaning of the words is analyzed. The other process is the syntactic parsing that analyses the grammatical structure of words and phrases in a sentence and determines what semantic ideas where expressed in that context. These cognitive processes play a big role in the comprehension of the garden path effects in our language. The garden path effect is the misleading, the misunderstanding, the ambiguity found in a sentence that has more than one meaning. This concept is assimilated with a maze where you get lost, you are mislead until you find the right outlet. Many times this event can be frustrating because of the ambiguity and the uncertainty we feel on our way to find the right meaning of a sentence. The way our brain works is whenever we hear someone talking or when we read