When The Horse Raced Past The Barn Fell

A garden path sentence, such as “The horse raced past the barn fell”, is grammatically correct, but is usually perceived as wrong when people first read it. There’s a word or a phrase in the sentence that can be interpreted in more than one ways, which created a contemporary ambiguity when people encounter it while reading. In this sentence, “raced past the barn” is the ambiguous source. It can be interpreted as the predicate phrase of the sentence, which means that horse jumped over the barn; or it can be interpreted as a verbal phrase that describes the horse, which means that among many horses, the one that raced past the barn is the horse we are talking about in this sentence. Studies have shown that most people would choose the first interpretation