Sentences that appear to mean one thing in the beginning, but mean something else in the end. For example "After the musician played the piano... was wheeled  off stage". Reading the first part "After the musician played the piano..." may leave you thinking that the sentence will be talking about the musician, but it ends up finishing with something about the piano.

Garden path sentences

When a person encounters a new word in a sentence, they first assume that the word is part of the current phrase. This can lead to later discoveries that the phrases are broken up differently than expected (sometimes leading to garden path sentences).

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

As people read a sentence, they group words into phrased based on syntactic rules. If their interpretation is wrong, they will look for new information to take into account to form coherency.

Syntax-first approach to parsing

Goldstein, E. B. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Nelson Education.


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