Object relatives are not always more difficult to process, even in Spanish. Evidence from a study of relative clauses comprehension with psychological predicates

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

Amherst

Conferencia; CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference; 2020

University of Massachussets

The asymmetry in the processing of subject (S) and object (O) relative clauses (RC) is well documented in literature and seems to be present in a wide range of languages (e.g. Spanish, English, Dutch, German and French) in language acquisition (e.g. Friedmann et al. 2009), in sentence production (e.g. Belletti & Contemori 2010; in Spanish, Muñoz Pérez & Lago 2012); and in sentence comprehension (e.g. Gordon et al. 2004; in Spanish, Sánchez et al. 2017). However, this asymmetry has only been studied in sentences with transitive activity predicates (TAP), while there has been no evidence reported regarding the processing of RCs with psychological predicates. Since Friedmann et al. (2009), it has been argued that the advantage for SRCs can be explained by the Featural Relativized Minimality theory (fRM; Rizzi 2004) as an effect of syntactic intervention. As both the subject NP and the object NP share the [+N] syntactic feature, the subject NP functions as an intervener when the object NP moves to the left periphery, hindering the establishment of the syntactic dependency. However, the syntactic structure of sentences with third class psychological predicates(TCPP) (Belletti &; Rizzi 1988) such as gustar (?to like?) differs from the structure of sentences with TAPs. Pujalte (2015) argues that in Spanish, ?objects? of TCPPs are generated in a higher syntactic position than ?subjects?, i.e. as high applicative phrases (Pylkkänen 2008). Therefore, the effects of syntactic intervention should occur in the opposite condition and the processing of ORCs with these predicates should entail lower cognitive cost than SRCs. Design: we designed a sentence comprehension task in which participants (n=33) were asked to listen to a sentence; then were showed an image and had to decide whether the sentence they heard was true or false regarding the image they saw. The stimuli (n=20) consisted of RCs with TCPPs (1) and with TAPs (2). In Spanish, TCPPs project the theme of the event with nominative case and the experiencer with dative case, so we chose TAPs that also project the agent of the event with nominative case and the patient with dative case. We manipulated the type of RC with each predicate: RCs with nominative case arguments as the antecedent or ?subject? (1.a and 2.a) and RCs with dative arguments as the antecedent or ?object? (1.b and 2.b). The image showed after the sentence was randomly selected to make the sentence either true or false. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show sample picture stimuli for sentences in (1). Response accuracy and reaction times (RTs) were measured during the task. Results: on average, participants answered 89% (SE= .8) of the total stimuli correctly; Table 1 shows the mean of correct answers and standard error per condition; Table 2, the mean of RTs and standard error. Linear mixed-effect models were fitted for data analysis. Results show that RCs with TCPPs were harder to comprehend (p=.02) and were processed more slowly (p<.001) than RCs with TAPs. As it wasexpected, in the case of RCs with TAPs, SRCs were easier to comprehend (p=.003) and faster to process than ORCs (p=.004). In the case of RCs with TCPPs, we found that ORCs were easier to comprehend (p=.007) but that there were no significant differences between ORCs and SRCs RTs (p=.82). Discussion: As predicted, SRCs with TCPPs were more difficult to comprehend than ORCs. These results can be explained as an effect of the intervention of the ?object? NP in the movement of the subject NP to the left periphery, following the fMR proposal. 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