The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

A normative study and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of animacy on the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish. The results showed that object relative clauses caused more difficulty than subject relative clauses, but that animacy modulated this preference. The overall pattern was similar to findings in other languages. However, because of the syntactic characteristics of Spanish relative clauses, the results give novel insights into the processing mechanisms that underlie relative clause processing.

Keywords:

• Syntactic processing
• Eye movements
• Animacy
• Subject relative clause

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science SEJ2006–09238 and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 (CSD2008–00048).

Notes

¹ Spanish also allows an additional relativizer al que/a la que, which can be used for object relatives modifying an animate NP. This form is unambiguous in the sense that it rules out a subject relative. In the present paper, we use the ambiguous relativizer que, for which object and subject relatives are both grammatical, and the modified NP may be animate or inanimate.