garden-path sentence
a sentence in which structural cues, lexical ambiguity, or a combination of both mislead the reader or listener into an incorrect interpretation until a disambiguating cue appears later in the sentence. For example, in the sentence As the car drove past the church clock could be heard striking, the appearance of the verb phrase could be heard indicates that a parsing of the sentence in which past is interpreted as governing the church is erroneous. Such sentences have proved useful in psycholinguistic research into the role of memory in sentence parsing.