Carrithers, C. (1989). Syntactic complexity does not necessarily make sentences harder to understand. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18(1), 75-88.

Carrithers, C.

1989

Carrithers, C. (1989). Syntactic complexity does not necessarily make sentences harder to understand. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 18(1), 75-88.

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Researchers studying language comprehension have assumed that more complex sentence constructions take longer to process. However, data obtained from 56 right-handed male undergraduates in the present study, which used reading rates as the dependent measure, suggest that it is the interaction of specific types of deep structure representations with their surface structure forms that accounts for fluctuations in readers' online processing of various sentence types. Those sentences in which the deep structure direct object immediately preceded the verb in the surface structure sequence were easier for comprehenders to process. Data support a dual, parallel processing model of sentence comprehension in which lexical and morphological/relational information are processed independently.

The data collected in this experiment support two hypothesis that are counterintuitive to the assumptions that underlie most psycholinguistic research: (1) There is no necessary correlation between the complexity of the derived mental representation of a sentence and the complexity of the comprehension processes used to compute this semantic representation. (2) There is no necessary correlation between the linguistic complexity of a sentence type and processing complexity; e.g. the structurally more complex passive clauses containing unmarked verbs were read faster than simple actives, while the structurally equivalent passives clauses containing ergative psych verbs were read more slowly. This means that researchers cannot use syntactic complexity as the sole determiner of processing difficulties.

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