garden-path sentence

Inhibition in the processing of garden-path sentences.

Misinterpretations of Garden-Path Sentences: Implications for Models of Sentence Processing and Reanalysis (PDF)

The parser was shown to be incapable of processing garden-path sentences (i.e. sentences which cause incorrect syntactic premises to be made e.g. 'the cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi').

This is an example of a garden-path sentence, a phrase that the reader or listener normally begins to parse according to one grammatical structure, and is then forced to back up and reparse when the sentence ends in an unexpected way.

In this context, parsing refers to the way that human beings analyze a sentence or phrase (in spoken language or text) "in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc." This term is especially common when discussing what linguistic cues help speakers to interpret garden-path sentences.