Prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension: an eye-tracking study

ABSTRACT

We report an eye-tracking experiment that examined argument linking and the role of prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension by testing the interplay between word order and verb type. Previous evidence from a self-paced reading study (Gattei, Dickey, Wainselboim, & París, 2015). showed that comprehenders use morphosyntactic information to form predictions about the thematic structure of the upcoming verb. In this study we focussed on the time course of this process. Results showed an interaction between verb type and word order for late eye movement measures but not for early eye movement measures. Participants regressed more and for longer time when word order did not match the canonical order for each verb class. This interaction is observed from the verb region onwards, independently of word order. We interpret that these effects take place due to the misinterpretation of the prominence status of the preverbal argument, leading to differential reading strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Prominence
• word order
• verb class
• eye-tracking
• spanish

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Carolina A. Gattei http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7490-3363

Notes

1 The dative clitic can be understood as the incorporation of a new argument to the logic structure “responder ,” where x is the Actor and y is a linguistic object that acts as a stimulus (e.g. a letter, a question, etc.). The clitic “le” corresponds to argument z, the recipient of that letter, question. Once it is added to the structure, it ranks higher for Undergoer than y just like a ditransitive structure in English of the kind “Mary sends John a letter.” This is an extremely productive process in Spanish (Cuervo, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas [National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)] as part of the research project entitled “Relaciones entre procesos léxicos y procesos sintácticos en la producción y la comprensión de lenguaje” under [grant number PIP 112 201101 00994].