Phonological typicality and sentence processing.

In studies of language, it is widely accepted that the form of a word is independent of its meaning and syntactic category. Thus, the relationship between phonological form and grammatical class would not be expected to affect reading time. However, Farmer et al. have now shown that the phonological typicality of a noun or verb influences how rapidly it is read. This finding has implications for both sentence processing and the interpretation of fixation patterns in reading.