Word Order alternation as a cue for argument interpretation in Spanish verb acquisition

GATTEI, CAROLINA ANDREA; SHALOM, DIEGO EDGAR

Otro; 6th Latin American School for Education, Cognitive and Neural Sciences (LASchool); 2016

Spanish is an SVO language with most declarative sentences following this Word Order (WO), as shown in (1)However, OVS and VS is considered the canonical WO for anumber of verb classes, (2)(1) El chico le lee a María.The boyNOM DAT read3.SG. to MaríaDAT.'The boy reads to María.'(2) Al chico le desagrada María.To the boyDAT DAT dislike3.SG MaríaNOM.'The boy dislikes María.'Evidence in adults has shown that reading these sentences in the non-canonical WO, for each verb class leads to higher error rates in comprehension questions, higher reading and response times and more regressive saccades.It has been proposed that the Human Sentence Processing Mechanism (HSPM) takes into account both syntactic(morphological case marking, position, agreement) and semantic (animacy, definiteness) information of the arguments preceding the verb and assigns the first one the most ?actor-like? possible thematic role according to their language's language-specific features. It then predicts the verb class and type of syntaxsemanticlinking that will come accordingly. Thus, comprehension issues and increase of cognitive cost is theconsequence of a misleading linking prediction. These results have been obtained in German, Dutch,Russian[8], Chinese, English, Italian and Spanish, showing that this principle holds for typologically very differentlanguages. A question that remains unanswered is when -during language acquisition- children become sensitive to this relation between syntax, semantics and events representation.