Language Comprehension

Language Comprehension

Introduction

The garden path is one of the important phenomena in psycholinguistic and literature context. It is basically a form of sentence that leads to the misinterpretation of the readers. These kinds of sentences are widely used in the subject of psycholinguistics in order to analyze the reading capabilities of human beings and it tend to provide an account of the fact that people process the words in a sentence one by one. This paper discuses the findings and results of the empirical evidences of the researches in the area of garden path sentences and their psycholinguistic importance. The garden path affect is analyzed through the nature of the sentence and the outcome it produces. It also misleads several people due to the difference in the interpretation of the sentence.

Discussion

There are a number of researches that analyzes the concept and phenomena of garden path effect. The sentences that reflect the ambiguity within them end to have an effect on the psychological health of the people. For example, in a sentence “the spy saw the cop with a revolver”, the researcher has demonstrated the ambiguity issue within the sentence. According to Rayner, Frazier and Carlson (1983) the people will interpret the phrase while focusing on the preposition that is “with” and “to” that it is modifying the verb in the sentence that is “saw”. They do not immediately focus on the preceding noun in the sentence which is “the cop”. This occurs when the issue lies in the verbal attachment during the interpretation of a sentence and its words. It also affects the representation of the structure of the sentence. The psychoanalytic concept occurs in it due to the movements of eyes that tend to analyze the patterns of the sentence that structures the words in a sentence. In the case of the above mentioned sentence, it can be interpreted as if the spy saw the cop through his binoculars (Traxler, 2008). This interpretation is due to the fact that perhaps the spy is considered to be watching the cop from a far background and he must have used the binoculars to see him. It seems as an apparent fixation of eyes which occurs when the people analyze the situation in which the cop holds a revolver. The people focus on the revolver which can be seen from far away. The preposition in the sentence is attached to the preceding verb which leads to the ambiguity within the noun phrase and the sentence. The binoculars in the sentence are also the noun phrase but they are the continuation of the complete phrase that was mentioned above (Traxler, 2008).

The presence of the affects of garden path in the sentence and the existence of the ambiguities within the sentences leads us towards the evidence that there is a processing system or mechanism inside the brains of the human beings which immediately makes decisions regarding the alternatives or the conditions related to a sentence. They might add their own assumptions in the ...