Course Textbook:
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Original Question:
This week's discussion assignment is a real brain strain! Try your hand at interpreting one of the "garden path" sentences below (remember that a garden path sentence is one that starts sound like it is going to mean one thing and then ends leaving you believing it means another). Don't worry if some of the sentences don't seem to make sense--you've been garden pathed!
Be sure to cite and reference all outside materials, including the text book. All posts should include at least one outside source. If you use the text book your citation should look like this (Goldstein, 2015) in the body of your post. If you are making a direct quote, you should also include the page number (Goldstein, 2015, p. 20). At the end of your post you should include the following Reference listing:
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Reply to the following response with 200 words minimum. (please make response as if having a conversation, respond directly to some of the statements in below post.)
The sentence "We painted the wall with cracks," to me, sounds like it should end something like "We painted the wall with new paint" instead. But when I do finally reach the end of the sentence "with cracks" becomes a descriptive clause for the wall that got painted. This is an example of late closure working to my disadvantage. Late closure describes our tendency to associate as many words as we can with the first clause in sentence (Goldstein, 2015, p. 311).
Being a language instructor, I live for concepts like garden path sentences. My students come to me all the time complaining that Pashto doesn't make sense and doesn't follow its own rules. Being able to show them equally (often more) confusing excerpts in English helps put things in perspective sometimes.
This would be a sentence I'd use to teach students the importance of "??" (pronounced "chay") or "that," the marker indicating a clause in Pashto. When we, as English speakers, read the sentence it almost sounds like we're painting the wall with a bucket full of cracks, until of course we rethink the sentence. After learning Pashto, I always mentally add different clauses to sentences to make them more clear in my mind. In this example, I'd say "We painted the wall that had/has cracks."
This tendency is quite useful in grappling with garden path sentences in English and seems to be a product of learning Pashto. Pashto is a language that you to have a "that" clause in order express the correct meaning of the sentence. If you directly translate this sentence, it would mean literally painting the wall using cracks, kind of resulting in an artistic way of saying that you destroyed the wall.
I was curious as to whether or not this reflex of adding clarifying clauses to ambiguous sentences in English was common among other foreign language learners. In my search, I found an article expressing a very similar phenomenon. According to Teubner-Rhodes et al., bilingual individuals are more adept and quick at sensing conflict within a sentence and adjusting accordingly.
This tendency was also found in monolingual individuals, but only after extensive practice (2016, p. 227). Learning an additional language might be a way to reduce the amount of time we spend being tripped up by garden path sentences. Admittedly though, this is a complex solution to a much smaller problem. Fine and Jaeger confirm that simply practicing garden path comprehension in English should be enough to mitigate the cognitive confusion (As cited in Goldstein, 2015, p. 316).
-Brittany
References
Goldstein, B. E. (2015). Cognitive psychology, connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (4th. Ed.) [VitalBook Version]. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Teubner-Rhodes, S. E., Mishler, A., Corbett, R., Andreu, L., Sanz-Torrent., Trueswell, J. C., & Novick, J. M. (2016). The effects of bilingualism on conflict monitoring, cognitive control, and garden-path recovery.