1. a form of programmed instruction that provides additional steps, or branches, to be followed if the standard teaching material has not been adequately mastered to a given level of proficiency. Correct and incorrect answers lead to branches of new material so that students complete different sequences depending on how well they perform. Also called branching program.

2. in linguistics, a method of analyzing the formal structure of a sentence by representing it diagrammatically as a treelike structure with an organized hierarchy of branches and subbranches. In phrase-structure grammar, a tree diagram of this kind (also known as a phrase marker) is often used to illustrate the set of phrase-structure rules that generates a particular grammatical sentence: The diagram so produced will also be a constituent analysis of the sentence in question. Theories of branching have been used in predicting psycholinguistic phenomena and in creating linguistic typologies.