Why does a garden-path sentence like, 'The old man the boats,' initially cause processing difficulty for readers?

💡 Explanation

The sentence is temporarily ambiguous, leading the reader to initially parse 'man' as a verb. Syntactic reanalysis is required when the reader realizes 'man' is a noun, because the initial parse is incorrect. Therefore, garden-path sentences increase processing load, rather than effects from memory, lexicon, or semantic fatigue.

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