| Abstract: | Recent research has demonstrated the psychological reality of syntactic structure in language comprehension. A syntactic structure is a representation of the linear and hierarchical relations among words. It is proposed that such a structure must be created and then semantically interpreted in order for a listener or reader to understand a sentence. Some psychologists have claimed that comprehenders do not rely on purely syntactic strategies to parse sentences; instead, comprehenders use a variety of semantic heuristics and bypass syntactic analysis altogether. Work that my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that comprehenders do use syntactic strategies to parse sentences. In particular, evidence shows that comprehenders attempt to construct the simplest syntactic structure possible, and only revise that interpretation if the sentence becomes syntactically or semantically anomalous. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
