The Little Oxford dictionary (1986) defines syntactic knowledge as "the grammatical arrangement of words/rules or analysis of this", while semantic knowledge is described as knowledge "of the meaning in language."
But what is comprehension? Anderson claims "comprehension involves a perceptual stage, followed by a parsing stage, followed by a utilisation stage." Parsing is the process by which the words in the message are transformed into a mental representation of the combined meaning of the words. While the utilisation is the stage in which the comprehenders actually use the mental representation of the sentence. It is also important to look at the syntactic clues in relation to comprehension for example: Inflection: An alternation of the form of a word by adding affixes, as in English dogs from dogs, or by changing the form of a base, as in English spoke from speak, that indicates grammatical features such as a number, person, mood, or tense.
"Him kicked the girl. Who got kicked?"
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