THE EXTRACTION OF PHRASE STRUCTURE DURING READING - EVIDENCE FROM LETTER DETECTION ERRORS

In light of recent suggestions regarding the prominence of structure i n speech production and comprehension, it has been postulated that str uctural processing might also play a similarly important role in readi ng. Some evidence in support of this contention can be gleaned from ey e-movement research. However, more systematic support comes from recen t work on letter detection during reading, which has shown that the ra te of omission errors is inordinately high for morphemes that disclose phrase structure. The results of three lines of research suggest that , early in text processing, readers attempt to extract a structural fr ame for the sentence to help the on-line integration of accessed repre sentations, and that structure-supporting units recede to the backgrou nd as the meaning of the sentence evolves.