In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".
When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing.
[2] The difficulty in correctly parsing the sentence results from the fact that readers tend to interpret old as an adjective.
As with other examples, one explanation for the initial misunderstanding by the reader is that a sequence of words or phrases tends to be analyzed in terms of a frequent pattern: in this case: determiner – adjective – noun.
[6] Such examples of initial ambiguity resulting from a "reduced relative with [a] potentially intransitive verb" ("The horse raced in the barn fell.")
As with other examples, one explanation for the initial misunderstanding by the reader is that a sequence of phrases tends to be analyzed in terms of the frequent pattern: agent – action – patient.
[7] "Modern bei dieser Bilderausstellung werden vor allem die Rahmen, denn sie sind aus Holz und im feuchten Keller gelagert worden."
The sentence may be parsed and interpreted in different ways due to the influence of pragmatics, semantics, or other factors describing the extralinguistic context.
[13] A research paper published by Meseguer, Carreiras and Clifton (2002) stated that intensive eye movements are observed when people are recovering from a mild garden-path sentence.
As the child ages and their executive functioning completes development, they gain the ability to revise the initial incorrect parsing.
This ability could be due to the adults’ developed executive functioning allowing them more cognitive resources, discourse and referential information, to aid in parsing and revision.
Additionally, the use of discourse and referential information could be due to L1-transfer because Italian and English share the same sentence structure.
The results of this study indicate that difficulties in parsing revision are more common than originally thought and are not just confined to children or individuals with reduced executive functioning.
But adult L2 learners and native speaking children had similar error rates for garden-path sentences with no reference information, indicating systematic revision failure.