Thematic Hierarchy and sentence processing: A study of the interaction between verb class and word order in Spanish

GATTEI, CAROLINA; WAINSELBOIM, ALEJANDRO; DICKEY, MICHAEL WALSH; PARÍS, LUIS

QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

PSYCHOLOGY PRESS

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2014

1747-0218

The effects of scrambling for language processing are still under discussion and the answer to the question of how scrambled sentences are processed still remains inconclusive. A vast amount of studies has found that word order movement entails higher processing cost. However, evidence from studies on different languages suggests that word order variation may not always lead to processing difficulty. The current study was carried out in order to provide further evidence by means of a self-paced reading task with two different types of verbs in Spanish: psychological verbs and agentive verbs. The reason to use these types of verbs is that they differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked. Results of the current study support the idea that different syntax-independent factors should be taken into account to explain how processing scramble sentences. The outcome of both on-line and off-line tasks indicates that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when sentences are presented in canonical thematic word order, irrespectively of the canonical syntactic word order of the language. Moreover, in the current self-paced reading task we were able to elicit thematic reanalysis effects similar to the ones found by Bornkessel et al. (2003) in German, and showed that readers parse sentences incrementally by assigning the highest possible thematic role in the hierarchy to the first argument of the sentence in Spanish as well. Our study support the idea that language parsing is a process that is done incrementally by considering different types of linguistic information in parallel.