Syntactic Parsing: In Search of the Garden Path
Max Coltheart · 2016
Identifying letters and words is but a small part of the reading process (though of course a critical one). Combining words into phrases, or syntactic parsing, is a further essential step on the way to comprehending written sentences. The active imposition of syntactic structure may be especially important in reading, since printed text lacks the prosodic information which presumably assists listeners to decide on phrasal groupings during spoken language understanding. The aim of the research described here is to shed some light on the use of syntactic knowledge in reading.