Minimal attachment is a principle in sentence processing that suggests readers or listeners tend to attach new information to the existing structure of a sentence in the simplest way possible. This concept helps explain why people often struggle with syntactically ambiguous sentences, leading to garden path sentences where the initial interpretation of a sentence becomes incorrect upon further reading. Understanding minimal attachment is crucial for analyzing how syntactic representation influences comprehension and parsing during language processing.
congrats on reading the definition of Minimal Attachment. now let's actually learn it.