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Ansvar väger tyngre än frihet - Responsibility trumps liberty

6 juni 2015

Psycholinguistic garden paths

Ur Steven Pinkers The Sense of Style (s. 119):

"...for every ambiguity that yields a coherent (but unintended) interpretation of the whole sentence, there must be thousands which trip up the reader momentarily, forcing her to backtrack and re-parse a few words. Psycholinguists call these ambiguities 'garden paths,' from the expression 'to lead someone up the garden path,' that is, to mislead him. They have made an art form of grammatical yet unparsable sentences:

The horse raced past the barn fell. 
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. 
Cotton clothing is made from is grown in Egypt. 
Fat people eat accumulates. 
The prime number few. 
When Fred eats food gets thrown. 
I convinced her children are noisy. 
She told me a little white lie will come back to haunt me. 
The old man the boat. 
Have the students who failed the exam take the supplementary."

De exempel Pinker citerar är hämtade ur Bever, T. G. (1970), The cognitive bias for linguistic structures, i J. R. Hayes (red.), Cognition and the development of language. New York: Wiley.

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