The role of presentation modality in sentence processing

The question of whether listening comprehension is more or less costly than reading comprehension remains open. We investigate whether the effects of grammatical complexity are the same in reading and listening to sentences. We show that presentation mode has no effect on comprehension accuracy but does affect response times. In both modes, the most difficult constructions to comprehend and the longest constructions to process were the same, demonstrating that the cost of syntactic processing is not affected by presentation modality.