High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that the readers` most likely interpretation will be incorrect; they are lured into an improper parse that turns out to be a dead end. Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate the fact that when they read, human beings process language one word at a time. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down the garden path", meaning "to be misled". According to one current psycholinguistic theory, as a person reads a garden path sentence, the reader builds up a structure of meaning one word at a time. At some point, it becomes clear to the reader that the next word or phrase cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far: it is inconsistent with the path they have been led down. Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text.