Cognitive effort during the processing ofrelative clauses with psychological predicates in Spanish: a pupillometric study

MARISOL MURUJOSA; CAROLINA GATTEI; DIEGO SHALOM; YAMILA SEVILLA

Potsdam

Congreso; 26th Architecturesand Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference; 2020

University of Potsdam

The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is welldocumented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g, in Spanish; in English; in German; and French). However, this asymmetry has mostly been studied insentences with transitive activity predicates (ACT), while there has been no evidence reportedregarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates (PSY). Memory based accountsof this phenomena predict a general locality preference for shorter filler-gap dependencies(Gibson, 1998; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). In the case RCs with ACTs, SRCs instantiate a shorterfiller-gap dependency than ORCs and this explains why the former are easier to process. However, considering the structural properties of PSYs in Spanish (see note 1), it?s in the case ofORCs that a shorter filler-gap dependency is established. Therefore, the processing of ORCswith these predicates should entail less difficulty and lower cognitive effort than SRCs. Taskevoked pupillary responses (TEPR) have been used as a reliable neurophysiological index ofcognitive effort in different domains (Beatty, 1982; Beatty & Lucero-Wagoner, 2000). In the sentence comprehension domain, TEPRs have provided a measure of differential processing costaccording to the type of structure and its syntactic complexity (e.g, Just and Carpenter, 1993;Scheepers & Crocker, 2004; Schluroff, 1982). Design: 33 subjects participated in an auditorysentence comprehension task. They were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed animage and were prompted to judge whether the image they saw faithfully reflected the contentof the sentence heard or not (see Fig. 1). The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with PSYs (1)and with ACTs (2) (see note 2). We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: SRCs (1.aand 2.a) and ORCs (1.b and 2.b). The images selected were counterbalanced to make the sentences either true or false. Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs), as well as TEPRs,were measured during the task. Pupil diameter was monitored using a desktop-mounted, videobased eye tracker (EyeLink 1000, SR Research Ltd., Ontario, Canada) at a sampling rate of1000 Hz. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= 0.8%) of the total stimuli correctly; Figs. 2 and 3 show mean correct answers and standard error, and mean RTs and standard error (only RTs of correct answers were considered) according to condition respectively.Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with PSYswere harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p