For one both our auditory and visual senses have limited bandwidth. Reading is done in saccades, so already at the source the information comes in sentence chun

For one both our auditory and visual senses have limited bandwidth. Reading is done in saccades, so already at the source the information comes in sentence chunks at a time. The opportunity for massive-parallelness is in disambiguating a huge number of possible interpretations. Before you can construct the possible candidates, you first need to have processed enough of the sentence. But since you can process new sensory input at the same time as disambiguating previous input, you can get the garden path effect. What I find interesting about the garden path effect though is that it's so artificial, so the way language is used normally seems to purposely avoid ambiguities that will trip up listeners/readers.