Why Syntax Matters: The Hidden Key to Reading Comprehension

Associate Research Professor at the Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Connecticut; Clinical Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center; and Research Scientist at the Yale-UConn Haskins Global Literacy Hub

Updated on November 12, 2026

Do you feel yourself tighten at the thought of fitting one more topic of instruction into your literacy block? Do you tighten even more when you find out that this “extra” topic is “syntax?”

If you’re like most teachers today, syntax didn’t figure into your teacher-prep coursework at all … and, odds are, you yourself didn’t feel so warm and cuddly about that topic when you were in grade school. These are the attitudes toward syntax I’m hearing as I go around promoting the message that syntax is a foundational skill for comprehension. To make the issue more concrete, in my survey of usage and attitudes toward syntax, 52% of respondents say the biggest barrier to including syntax in their instruction is not having enough time for it. Surely a contributing factor to this is educators don’t feel confident about doing it (44% responded this way). This explains why most of my respondents (56%) spend less than 10 minutes a day on syntax. At the same time, 77% of those who include syntax in their instruction report benefits, with 40% reporting “exceedingly clear” benefits.

I take these numbers as marching orders. I have spent more than 30 years studying how the brain processes language and what happens when comprehension fails. The upshot of the huge body of NSF- and NIH-funded research by myself and a large community of language scientists is that syntactic processing serves as the starting point for comprehension. That’s perhaps a surprising statement, because syntax has not played a starring role in the way educators think about comprehension. In fact, the National Reading Panel’s (2000) report didn’t even include mention of syntax as one of the Big Five, which instead highlighted phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. (I have written more about this topic in this freely available article from The Reading League.) Of these five, probably the most likely starting point for comprehension would be vocabulary (assuming we consider phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency are primarily relevant for the decoding aspect of reading). The fact that vocabulary is not enough can be demonstrated clearly when you consider sentences where the meaning of all the individual words is known, but comprehension comes only once you consider the syntax of the sentence. Here are some of my favorites, totally grammatical examples (no fantasy interpretations allowed; explanations appear at the end). As you read these, ask yourself: Which comprehension strategies would help students understand these sentences?

The old man the boats.
The old train the young.
Fruit flies like a banana.
The complex houses married and single soldiers.
Fat people eat accumulates.
The horse raced past the barn fell.

I hope your answer is that comprehension strategies aren’t enough. If a person isn’t able to process the syntax of the sentence, then the entire meaning is lost. Moreover, if the meaning of these is lost for you, who I assume to be a skilled reader, what about readers with developmental language disability (DLD), for whom syntax is especially challenging? (Hear more discussion of DLD in the EDVIEW360 podcast with Dr. Tiffany Hogan, Where Literacy Begins). It is sobering to hear Dr. Hogan explain children with dyslexia have a 50% chance of also having DLD, while 58% of children with DLD have no problem reading words. This means there are many students in our classrooms who struggle with sentence-level syntactic skills, and we might not even notice they are struggling because our primary focus is on building decoding skills.

Coming back to my marching orders, step one is to continue to make the case that syntax matters. You can hear me talk about this on the EDVIEW360 podcast episode, Why Syntax Matters: The Hidden Key to Reading Comprehension. I’ve also recorded a presentation about “Why Syntax Matters” posted on my Substack “Decoding Syntax.” My hope is that this Substack space will be a repository for information that will help address the question of “Why syntax matters,” but also address the other issues raised in my teacher survey. In particular, I see step two of my marching orders to support teachers in becoming more confident about syntax. This is of utmost importance, since the longer we wait to incorporate this instruction, the more students we will continue to lose to illiteracy. We simply can’t wait for every teacher to go off for an extended professional development course in syntax—we must go from nothing to something now.

On the EDVIEW360 podcast episode, Why Syntax Matters: The Hidden Key to Reading Comprehension, I discuss the minimum knowledge teachers should know about syntax, as well as some tools and strategies teachers can implement today. Chief among these is Cascade Reading, a free-to-teachers reading technology that augments the spatial layout of a sentence with visual cues about the syntactic relationships within it. This creates in-the-moment scaffolding for accurate word-by-word comprehension in real time—as it is happening. I talk about data from our recently published randomized controlled trial that demonstrates improved comprehension after 12 weeks of reading in this format, even without extensive explicit instruction in syntax. We talk about how this fits inside a Structured Literacy classroom, and why explicit instruction is crucial for teaching decoding, but less crucial—and not even possible—for comprehension, which involves an infinite range of syntactic constructions.

Tune in to hear more and connect with me via Substack or LinkedIn to share your own experience with incorporating syntax into your classroom practice.

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Sentence Meanings

“man’ is the verb and “the old” is the subject. So, the sentence can be paraphrased as “the old people are manning the boats.” The sentence is difficult because “the old man” is a frequent noun phrase, so initially our brains will not consider the verbal meaning of “man.”
“train” is the verb and “the old” is the subject. So, the sentence can be paraphrased as “the old people are training the young.” This one is like the previous one—our brains lock onto the noun meaning of “train” first.
“fruit flies” is the subject and “like” is the verb. So, the sentence can be paraphrased as “fruit flies are attracted to the banana.” The sentence is difficult because our brains realized that “flies” is more often a verb than it is a noun, so our first inclination is to parse the sentence to mean the fruit is flying, which sounds strange.
Our brains want to interpret “the complex houses” as a noun phrase, when, in fact, “houses” is the verb.
We want to group “fat people” into a noun phrase and “eat” as its verb but that doesn’t make sense. Really it should be understood here as “fat that people eat accumulates.”
Like the previous sentence, our brains are tricked by the reduced subordinate clause. The meaning here is “the horse, which was raced past the barn, fell.” Commas help in the written modality, but even if you hear this sentence spoken out loud, it remains difficult because the reduced subordinate clause doesn’t happen so often in speech, despite being perfectly grammatical.