PHP's white screen of death

Now that I'm starting to get back into PHP, I'm starting to remember why I gave it up in the first place. The most annoying thing on my plate at the moment is what I've come to term "PHP's white screen of death". When PHP gets a fatal error due to syntax or whatever, it seems like it will always die without actually sending anything to the browser. I've added the following to my .htaccess, and it seems to work most of the time, but it doesn't work in these cases.

php_value display_errors 1
php_value display_startup_errors 1
php_value error_reporting 2147483647 # E_ALL

Am I missing something? At the moment I feel like I need to hit refresh every few lines of code I write, lest I make a mistake and have to search through many pages trying to track down that one little mistake I made...

EDIT: For example, given the two lines of code below:

$foo = array(':language' => $languageId;
$foo = array(':language' => $languageId);

The first will exhibit the white screen of death (ie, nothing at all printed to the browser), while the second will execute happily.