One of the reasons why listening is so much easier than reading is that speech contains an acoustic rainbow of prosodic information -- the inflections, pauses, and intonations that are musically wrapped around the actual words we articulate. This prosodic information is actually syntactic parsing information, and this parsing information is used instantly by the listener to grasp the overall structure and meaning of the sentence being spoken. In text, we get very little of this kind of rich, syntactic parsing information, and instead, we must build it up, in an abstract fashion, as we carefully interpret one word after another.
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