Wrong way effect

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The garden path sentence ( English garden path effect ) refers to the phenomenon when a reader in a linguistic expression with multiple readings during the gradual understanding first selects the misreading and corrected in the course, as it recognizes the error in the following context. Wolf Schneider speaks of a false in-between sense. Such a sentence is also called a false sentence, for example: “The guards locked them up” - “They” are the convicts, but depending on the context, the guards locked up the convicts or the convicts locked up the guards.

The eponymous wrong path can also be found in the metaphor “ To be on the wrong path ”.

Wrong effects are mainly used in psycholinguistic research to investigate

  • whether listeners or readers only calculate one or more interpretations when understanding speech and
  • whether phonetic or prosodic cues are used to predict the following syntactic structure.

Examples

  • Incorrect placement of spaces within compound nouns can provoke this effect. For example, in “He telephoned for 24 months for no reason”, a correct sentence with a completely different meaning arises without the last word. The effect is particularly strong when the words at the end of the line are no longer directly next to each other.
  • "The frames in this picture exhibition are particularly modern, as they are made of wood and stored in a damp cellar." The reading of “modern” emphasized on the second syllable as “following the fashion” is prepared by the proximity to the “picture exhibition”; the correct interpretation as “musty” only becomes apparent at the end of the sentence.
  • In the case of “Maria added to her savings what she had earned during the asparagus harvest ”, an optional reading is learned asparagus , while asparagus harvest is correct.
  • "At my house on the reservoir, the reservoirs have to be cleaned, preferably with a duster."
  • “Which politician met the minister?” Here it is possible that the subject (“which politician”) is initially read as an accusative object.
  • The classic English-language example from Thomas Bever's research reads: “ The horse raced past the barn fell. “This sentence can generally only be properly understood after reading it several times. This is due to the reduced relative clause. The sentence is not reduced: “ The horse that was raced past the barn fell. ”( The horse that was being ridden past the barn fell. )

literature

  • Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon Language . 2000
  • J. Field: Psycholinguistics: The Key Concepts . Routledge, London / New York 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolf Schneider : German for professionals. Hamburg 1987 (3rd edition): Gruner + Jahr AG & Co., ISBN 3-442-11536-1 , p. 100.
  2. ↑ Play on words: Postmodern modern different . In: The press . March 29, 2008 ( diepresse.com [accessed March 2, 2016]).
  3. ↑ Michael Meng, Markus Bader: Mode of Disambiguation and Garden-Path Strength: An Investigation of Subject-Object Ambiguities in German . In: Language and Speech . tape 43 , no. 1 , 2000, pp. 43-74 , doi : 10.1177 / 00238309000430010201 .
  4. ^ Thomas G Bever: The cognitive basis for linguistic structures . 1970, OCLC 43300456 .