Answer to Question 1
In the word- superiority effect, letters are read more easily when they are embedded in words than when they are presented either in isolation or with letters that do not form words. People take substantially longer to read unrelated letters than to read letters that form a word. There is also a sentence-superiority effect: People take about twice as long to read unrelated words as to read words in a sentence.
Answer to Question 2
Other evidence of our uncanny aptitude for syntax is shown in the speech errors we produce. Even when we accidentally switch the placement of two words in a sentence, we still form grammatical, if meaningless or nonsensical, sentences. We almost invariably switch nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, prepositions for prepositions, and so on. For example, we may say, I put the oven in the cake.. But we will probably not say, I put the cake oven in the.. We usually even attach (and detach) appropriate function morphemes to make the switched words fit their new positions. For example, when meaning to say, The butter knives are in the drawer, we may say, The butter drawers are in the knife.. Here, we change drawer to plural and knives to singular to preserve the grammaticality of the sentence. Even so-called agrammatic aphasics, who have extreme difficulties in both comprehending and producing language, preserve syntactical categories in their speech errors.