Why bother? What our eyes tell about linking during the comprehension of psych verb (non) causative constructions.

GATTEI, CAROLINA; ALVEREZ, FEDERICO; PARIS, LUIS; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO; SEVILLA, YAMILA; SHALOM, DIEGO

Glossa Psycholinguistics

Free Journal Network

Lugar: Davis; Año: 2021

We present an eyetracking study that investigates how linking is achieved duringreal-time comprehension of Spanish sentences with causative psych verbs and alternative casemarking. This group of verbs lead to verbs’ argument structures that require direct or inversesyntax-to-semantics linking according to the type of case marking assigned to their object. Thestudy aimed at disentangling whether processing inverse linking was more costly than directlinking, and exploring how incremental argument interpretation takes place when lexemes thataccept several case markings are used. Results showed that during incremental comprehension,inverse linking is more difficult than direct linking, irrespective of word order. As for argumentinterpretation, the current study partially replicated the results of previous studies conductedin this language using different verb types. Findings are discussed under the light of differentpsycholinguistic models addressing case marking processing and incremental linking.