When readers spot typos: eyes reveal how brains fix garbled sentences

Garden-path sentences trick you into misreading by appearing grammatical until a late surprise that can't be fixed by reanalyzing grammar alone—only by assuming an error exists. Using eye-tracking, researchers found readers make precise backward glances to regions most likely to contain that error, matching the predictions of computational models that treat language comprehension as inferring what the speaker meant despite noise. This bridges psycholinguistics and information theory: your eyes literally move to where Bayesian statistics says an error should be.