Andrews describes how a worker handled a box with a picture of a broken goblet on the side. The symbol was intended to warn handlers the box contained fragile items. A dockworker tossed it onto the back of a truck, figuring the symbol indicated it contained broken glass. Syntactic features provide clues to unknown words. For example, nouns tend to be preceded by an article.
Suffixes signal to the reader that there is more than one.
Pronouns and prepositions, usually ignored by native language users, are keys for decoding by the second language reader. Native speakers of a language tend to skim or skip over these words. Their intimate knowledge of how their language is structured makes reading these types of words unnecessary. However, second language readers rely heavily on these words for clues in comprehension. When readers use the words and passages that make sense to decode what does not make sense, they are using semantic clues.