Why 'The old man the boat' stops you cold: garden-path sentences and a brain that guesses
30seconds
Read "The old man the boat." and your brain probably crashes at the fifth word. It guessed "the old man" was one person and waited for a verb that never came. The sentence is fine: the old are the people, and they man the boat.
This is a garden-path sentence. Step through three of them one word at a time and watch the structure your brain builds, and then has to break. Then see why, in one experiment, readers often still believed Anna dressed the baby after they had fixed the grammar.
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