"Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text."

Another random and crazy thought: people have experimented with textual and graphical programming languages -- I wonder what an aural programming language would be like? It's almost certainly impractical, but the idea is intriguing nonetheless.

Maybe slightly more practical would be some kind of aural complement to conventional sight-based programming systems...