Visual perception of rapidly presented word sequences of varying complexity

Abstract

Four experiments are described that determine whether or not syntactic complexity affects the visual perception of rapidly presented word sequences. The results indicate that sentences containing only one sentence in the underlying structure are more accurately reported than sentences containing two underlying sentences. It is shown that this result is not due solely to distortion of the input, but is likely to reflect the rate at which structural representations of the input can be developed. © 1970 Psychonomic Society, Inc.