Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the component of sentence processing time directly attributable to syntactic processing depends critically on certain semantic properties of the sentence. Using two different procedures, it is found in a series of experiments that there is little evidence to support this view. Specifically, it is shown that syntactic processing time tends to be constant for sentences of varying semantic plausibility but constant syntactic structure, and further, that reversibility fails to affect sentence processing in a systematic way. These facts are interpreted as indicating that the recovery of the underlying structure of a sentence is controlled by purely syntactic properties of the input.