title: Syntactic processing in the absence of awareness and semantics.
abstract: The classical view that multistep rule-based operations require consciousness has recently been challenged by findings that both multiword semantic processing and multistep arithmetic equations can be processed unconsciously. It remains unclear, however, whether pure rule-based cognitive processes can occur unconsciously in the absence of semantics. Here, after presenting 2 words consciously, we suppressed the third with continuous flash suppression. First, we showed that the third word in the subject-verb-verb format (syntactically incongruent) broke suppression significantly faster than the third word in the subject-verb-object format (syntactically congruent). Crucially, the same effect was observed even with sentences composed of pseudowords (pseudo subject-verb-adjective vs. pseudo subject-verb-object) without any semantic information. This is the first study to show that syntactic congruency can be processed unconsciously in the complete absence of semantics. Our findings illustrate how abstract rule-based processing (e.g., syntactic categories) can occur in the absence of visual awareness, even when deprived of semantics.
authors.affiliation: Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore.
authors.forename: Shao-Min
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Hung
authors.affiliation: Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore.
authors.forename: Po-Jang
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Hsieh
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D055815:Young Adult