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Processing controlled PROs in Spanish
Moises Betancort1, Manuel Carreiras, Carlos Acuña-Fariña
1Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, Campus de Guajara, 38205 Tenerife, Spain.
Cognition
|November 29, 2005
Summary
Readers quickly identify the antecedent for the empty category PRO in Spanish, using verb cues immediately but not prepositional cues initially. This fast process relies on verb control and recency.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Syntactic Theory
- Spanish Language Processing
Background:
- Investigates the processing of the empty category PRO in Spanish.
- Examines the time-course of antecedent recovery for PRO.
- Focuses on obligatory control constructions in Spanish sentences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine how verb and prepositional control information influences PRO antecedent selection.
- To elucidate the temporal dynamics of processing empty categories in Spanish infinitival clauses.
- To test psycholinguistic and formal linguistic hypotheses regarding PRO control.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments using eye-tracking during sentence reading in Spanish.
- Experiment 1 manipulated verb control (subject-control vs. object-control verbs).
- Experiment 2 manipulated prepositions in adverbial clauses (purpose 'para' vs. reason 'por').
Main Results:
- Immediate use of verb control information for PRO antecedent recovery was observed (Experiment 1).
- Prepositional control information (para vs. por) was not initially used for PRO antecedent selection (Experiment 2).
- PRO antecedent selection is a rapid process, influenced by verb control and recency.
Conclusions:
- Verb control information is crucial and immediately utilized in processing Spanish obligatory control constructions.
- Prepositions like 'para' and 'por' do not initially constrain PRO antecedent selection in adverbial clauses.
- Obligatory control ties are processed rapidly due to their lexical basis, aligning with syntactic principles.