Chapter 10 - Syntactic sentence processing

Summary

PREVIEW

This chapter considers how readers and listeners assign syntactic structure to strings of words. By the end of the chapter you should understand that:

• determining syntactic structure is an important aspect of sentence comprehension;

• markers of syntactic structure can help readers and listeners in this process;

• there are claims that comprehenders have certain preferred strategies that they can use in assigning syntactic structure to sentences.

Introduction

Chapters 8 and 9 assume that the word is a basic building block of language comprehension, and describe some of the psycholinguistic evidence for the recognition of spoken and written words respectively. The focus of this chapter is on how, during comprehension, we build a sentence structure using the sequence of words we have recognised. Although much of what is covered in this chapter can be applied equally to spoken and visual input, the evidence comes chiefly from studies of visual sentence processing, using techniques such as reading time measures and the tracking of eye movements during reading. Specific properties of spoken sentences, such as their prosodic structure, will be part of the material covered in Chapter 11.