The Role of Semantics Argument Order and the Semantics-Syntax Interface in Spanish Sentence Comprehension

GATTEI, CAROLINA; VASISHTH, SHRAVAN; DICKEY, MICHAEL WALSH

París

Workshop; Structuring the Argument / Structurer l'argument; 2011

Structures Formelles du Langage - UMR 7023 - CNRS

The present study investigated the eect of semantic hierarchy order in the processing of Spanish sentences. With this purpose, a self-paced reading task with two types of verbs was carried out. These verbs entail dierent type of mapping and can therefore provide evidence about how information proceeding from the syntax-semantics interface influences sentence comprehension. Verbs were also manipulated in syntactic order with the aim of analyzing whether readers found comprehension easier when the canonical hierarchy of the semantic arguments was preferred even when the syntactic order was not respected. The results showed that readers took a longer time to process the second argument of sentences when they followed a verb with indirect mapping than when they followed a verb with direct mapping. Besides, readers took longer time to read the second argument when they did not respect the semantic hierarchy required by the verb, irrespectively to the sentence syntactic order. These results support the ndings obtained in previous studies with impaired speakers and with neuroimaging techniques, and strengthen the idea that comprehension is a process that involves the intervention of several types of information in parallel. They also encourage further investigation of this property of language for expectation-based parsing models.