This study will explore the effects of visual segmentation on the resolution of early and late closure sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities. This study is based on the study Age-Related Impairments in the Revision of Syntactic Misanalyses: Effects of Prosody (2006) conducted by Debra A. Titone, Christine K. Koh, Margaret M. Kjelgaard, Stephanie Bruce, Shari R. Speer and Arthur Wingfield, which showed that auditory segmentation, in the form of prosody, has a significant impact on the resolution of such sentences. It also builds on the study Prosodic boundaries delay the processing of upcoming lexical information during silent sentence reading (2013) by Yingyi Luo, Ming Yan and Xiaolin Zhou, which demonstrated that the effect of commas on sentence disambiguation was identical to that of auditory segmentation cues.
We propose that visual segmentation, in the form of linebreaks, will have a similar effect to the one prosodic segmentation has been shown to have on the resolution of temporarily syntactically ambiguous sentences. We will examine the effect of segmentation at different syntactic areas on the speed and accuracy of comprehension. We will also examine the prosody of subvocalizations as a possible cause of such effects. This study can provide insight into how written language is processed, and may shed light on the relationship between auditory and visual processing of language, and the role that subvocalization plays in that relationship.