Features matter: the role of number and gender features during the online processing of subject- and object- relative clauses in Italian

ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigated whether different morphosyntactic features, i.e. number and gender, play a role during the adult online comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC), in Italian. This study was inspired by developmental studies showing that children struggle with ORC compared to SRC; yet, ORC comprehension improves if the head and the subject of the RC mismatch in relevant morphosyntactic features (e.g. number but not gender in Italian, based on the featural Relativized Minimality principle, fRM). We found that Italian adults read ORC more slowly than SRC verbs; moreover, ORC verbs were read faster in the head-subject number mismatch condition, while there was no facilitation in the head-subject gender mismatch condition, in line with developmental studies and fRM. We conclude that online parsing is feature-sensitive, that features are not all equally “relevant”, and that current models should be refined to account for these differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Sentence comprehension
• relative clauses
• number features
• gender features
• self-paced reading
• relativized minimality

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge that part of this research was presented at the (refereed) conference “34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing” (virtually held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 5th, 2021).

Authors’ contribution

N.B. wrote the original draft and was responsible for the design, the experimental material and the data acquisition/analysis/interpretation of Experiment 1 and 2.

E.P. read and commented the manuscript, and designed the experimental material of Experiment 1.

V.M. read and commented the manuscript, collaborated in the conceptualisation of the study and in the interpretation of the results.

L.R. read and commented the manuscript, worked at the theoretical underpinning of the analysis and at the interpretation of the results.

A.B. critically revised the manuscript, and contributed to all theoretical aspects related to the research question, and to the analysis and interpretation of the results.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We have indicated ‘headed’ relative clauses, as the asymmetry only concerns ORCs with a lexical head (e.g., the waiter in 2) and a lexical subject in relative clause (e.g., the boy in 2) has been clearly shown by the developmental results presented in Friedmann et al., 2009: Free ORCs that do not have a lexical noun phrase head and ORCs in which the subject of the relative clause is a pronoun (not a lexical noun phrase) are well mastered in development (for an overview, see Belletti & Rizzi, 2013). In this article we will often use the short abbreviations SRC and ORC to only refer to lexically headed relative clauses, with a lexical subject in relative clause in the case of ORCs, as currently done in the literature. However, the domain of the asymmetry should be kept in mind, throughout.

2 The retrieval cues generally mentioned are notions such as subjecthood, animacy, noun phrase and morphosyntactic features such as number, gender and Case.

3 Nouns that had the same masculine and feminine form, such as insegnante_MAS/FEM (teacher) or regista_MAS/FEM (director) were avoided.

4 Human entities were preferred (over animal entities as in some previous developmental studies, e.g., Adani et al., 2010) for methodological reasons. Language acquisition studies generally adopt sentence-picture matching tasks, where sentences are presented auditorily and only response accuracy/reaction times are recorded. However, in our study with an adult population, we adopted self-paced reading, where sentences are presented in written format, and word-by-word reading times are analyzed. The adoption of animal entities with different gender (e.g., “cane”, dog_MAS; “capra”, goat_FEM) would have led to pre-target regions (the NP intervener in the ORC condition) with completely different lemmas in the gender mismatch condition. The adoption of different pre-target regions could have affected the reading times of our target region.

It is worth mentioning that some developmental studies also used human entities in their experimental material. E.g., in Belletti et al. (2012) the same stimuli were used in Hebrew and Italian. Results showed different gender mismatch effects in the two languages. As discussed in the text, the authors reported a gender mismatch amelioration only in Hebrew, where there is gender verbal agreement (hence gender has the relevant status as feature attracting syntactic movement). We believe that this finding indicates that the use of human entities should not prevent gender effects to be found or not found based on the status of the feature in the language under investigation.

5 We decided to avoid auxiliary plus past participle verb forms, that is the near past known as passato prossimo in Italian (e.g., “ha chiamato”, has called), used in a previous study by Villata et al., 2018 because of a peculiar property of Italian past participles. Past participles within the passato prossimo can be inflected for gender and number in Italian in some structures, see e.g., in preverbal object clitic constructions (e.g., “Gianni l’ha chiamata, (Maria)”, Gianni CL_FEM/SG has called_FEM/SG, (Maria); “Gianni li ha chiamati, (Paolo e Roberto)”, Gianni CL_MAS/PL has called_MAS/PL, (Paolo and Roberto). In the type of constructions we tested, the past participle could not be inflected for number and gender. However, to our knowledge, no study has ever investigated whether Italian readers process or do not process gender/number information during the comprehension of the past participle of a passato prossimo verb form, and whether this process could interact with the processing of the auxiliary verb (and its own morphosyntactic features). Given that the main focus of the study was indeed the processing of different morphosyntactic features at the relative clause verb region, we decided to avoid this potential confound by adopting another verb form (the present).