Syntactic Prominence Effects On Discourse Processes

We propose that the meaning of a text is determined in part by syntactic structures that affect the relative prominence given to the concepts in the text. This proposal was tested in four experiments; the data showed that concepts placed in syntactically prominent positions have increased accessibility in short-term memory during reading and also increased accessibility later in long-term memory. We speculate on how such effects might be understood in terms of current theories of text processing and memory retrieval.