The cognitive processing of syntactic information: a study of relative clauses with subject and object extraction in Spanish

MANOILOFF, L.; CARANDO, C.; DEFAGÓ, C.; ALONSO ALEMANI, L.; FERRERO, C.; CESARETTI, D.; RAMÍREZ, A.; SEGUI, J.

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; 3rd ANPOLL Intl Psycholinguistics Congress : Domain Specificity in Language Acquisition and Processing; 2015

The study of the processing of syntactic components in relative clauses with subject (S) and object (O) extraction was studied in several languages: English (e.g. Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, 1974; Wanner & Maratsos, 1978; King, & Just, 1991), French (Frauenfelder, Segui & Mehler, 1980) and Spanish (Hoover, 1992; Betancort, Carreiras & Sturt, 2009, del Río et al., 2012), etc. In general, these studies showed differences in the processing of S and O relatives, being O a more complex clause. The accumulated evidence points that difficulties in processing the O relative could be due to a combination of syntactic, functional, discursive, semantic and experience-based factors (the frequency of occurrence). In this research, we focus on the purely grammatical aspects. The flexibility of the surface structure in Spanish provides an interesting case study to evaluate the grammatical complexity. Specifically, the aim of the study was to analyze the comprehension of relative clauses in Spanish with S and O extraction, distinguishing its various forms, and to infer the syntactic factors (such as canonical order [CO] and syntactic marking [SM]) that seem to influence in the complexity of semantic interpretation (processing costs). Also, a study on frequency of occurrence was included. The selected structures had very similar surface features, but different syntactic and semantic behaviour.First, an analysis of the frequency of occurrence on different structures in a corpus of local language was done. Second, two experimental tests were taken: a test of spontaneous understanding (role allocation) and a forced-choice task with a time limit; then, the amount of errors was calculated. The analysis of the frequency showed E1 and E4 having higher frequency and the remaining structures having lower frequency. The data obtained in tests 1 and 2 was similar: E1 and E4 structures were easier to understand, whereas E2 was the most difficult. In sum, this revealed that the syntactic factors that facilitate the understanding of these kinds of sentences are CO and subject-extraction, while the frequency would have a favorable impact on the understanding of such sentences.