Semantic and syntactic factors in the perception of rapidly presented sentences

A study involving the effects of syntactic & semantic factors on sentence processing used sentences representing four levels of syntactic complexity: simple declarative, compound, complex with rearranged subject-V-O order, & scrambled. Three types of sentences were used to examine the effect of semantic complexity: semantically well-integrated, semantically poorly integrated, & anomalous. It was hypothesized that at a high rate of presentation, if semantic interpretation occurs only after the completion of syntactic processing (as in Extended Standard Theory), only syntactic structure should be perceivable. Forty-eight filmed sentences were presented at either slow or fast (14, 24 frames per second) rate, & Ss (N = 36) asked to write down what they saw. Evidence in support of a transformational model of sentence processing was found only at the slow speed. At the faster speed, processing was clearly semantic, supporting the hypothesis that semantic processing occurs independently of, & in parallel with, syntactic processing. 2 Figures. B. Annesser