The Independence of Syntactic Processing

Three experiments addressed the question whether semantic content or pragmatic context can direct the initial syntactic analysis assigned to sentences. Each experiment determined whether syntactic processing biases that have been observed in sentences presented in isolation can be overcome. In two experiments that measured eye movements. we found that the syntactic processing biases remained even when they resulted in thematically based anomaly or when they conflicted with discourse biases. In a third experiment, we used a self-paced reading task to replicate some of the results obtained using eye movement measures. We argue that the data support the existence of a syntactic processing module.