Comprehension of relative clauses with psy- chological verbs in Spanish: predictability and intervention effects

MURUJOSA, MARISOL; GATTEI, CAROLINA ANDREA; SHALOM, DIEGO EDGAR; SEVILLA, YAMILA ALEJANDRA

Simposio; XV International Symposium of Psycholinguistics; 2021

Universidades Nebrija y Complutense de Madrid,

There is ample evidence that subject relatives (SR) are easier to comprehend than object relatives (OR). However, this asymmetry has not been studied outside of sentences with activity verbs (ACT). According to the featural Relativized Minimality framework (fRM, since Friedmann et al. 2009), the difficulty in the comprehension of ORCs is the result of the syntactic intervention of the subject NP in the movement of the object NP to the left periphery of the sentence. If, as it has been argued for Spanish, the object of psychological verbs such as gustar is generated in a higher syntactic position than the subject, the intervention effects should occur in the opposite condition and ORs should be easier than SRs. In this work we present the results of an auditory comprehension task with SRs and ORs with psychological (PSI) and activity verbs (ACT). While the results obtained fully corroborate the predictions of fRM for ACT, they only partially do so for PSI: ORs showed an advantage in accuracy, but both types of relatives showed the same latencies. We discuss these results taking into consideration new data obtained in a second experiment. We ran an online cloze task and a dissociation between the probability of appearance of a PSI or ACT verb in both types of relative was found. The differences found in the first experiment between both types of verbs will be discussed in light of these findings and we aim to explain how predictability modulates intervention effects in sentence comprehension.