What is the relationship between syntactic meaning and word perception?
* Associate Prof. of Languages and Linguistics, Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton, FL. Syntactic meaning makes word perception easier, because following the syntactic pattern enables the reader to assume the right mental set for predicting what part of speech is likely to be next, greatly reducing the number of possible words to be perceived at that point. The fact that we can silently read and understand: The none tolled hymn she had scene a pare of bear feat inn hour rheum in spite of the “wrong” spellings is attributable in part to the power of syntactic meaning as an aid to word perception. The syntax tells us the spellings are wrong and enables us to perceive the correct meaning by leading us to the appropriate homophones (nun, him, seen, etc.) Word-callers with little or no comprehension are not sufficiently using syntactic meaning, which would help them to perceive individual words more quickly and enable them to read fast enough to “chunk” for long-term memory storage.
