‘A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".[1]‘
”The horse raced past the barn fell”
”The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families”
“The old man the boat”
If you consider the idea that cognition might be fundamentally linguistic, garden path sentences become much more fascinating. It’s almost like a linguistic optical illusion, except it’s grammatically correct but doesn’t look like anything coherent, instead of being something that looks like a thing but isn’t. I inputted some garden path sentences into Stable Diffusion and it mostly seems to have not understood them at all despite all its AI training, but it still did come up with something, which seems very typical for humans and is probably characteristic of its creators. What do we want AI to do and how would a true AI handle this, that is the question. Probably time to try to program an AI on a 7-year-old PC.
Your creativity is phenomenal!