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Processing ambiguous Spanish se in a minimal chain
Enrique Meseguer1, Carlos Acuña-Fariña, Manuel Carreiras
1Departamento de Psicología Cognitiva, Campus de Guajara, Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. emesegue@ull.es
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|August 23, 2008
Summary
This study on Spanish language comprehension shows that processing complex sentence structures with missing information (gaps) before the actual words (fillers) aligns with the minimal chain principle, suggesting displacement is costly.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Language comprehension involves inferring missing information, termed "gaps," often resolved by finding "fillers."
- Romance languages like Spanish use the ambiguous particle "se" to license various grammatical structures with gaps, including reflexive, impersonal, and passive meanings.
- Constituent movement can leave gaps, posing processing challenges.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the processing of grammatical "gaps" in Spanish, specifically contrasting structures with preverbal subject gaps and postverbal subjects against impersonal and se-passive constructions.
- To evaluate the "minimal chain principle" which posits that linguistic displacement incurs processing costs due to complex derivational chains.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to compare the processing of different Spanish sentence structures.
- Structures contrasted included reflexive constructions with postverbal subjects versus impersonal constructions, and se-passives with varying argument structures.
- Comparisons focused on non-standard word orders (postverbal subjects, preverbal gaps) against less frequent, complex structures like impersonals and se-passives.
Main Results:
- The study found that the minimal chain principle generally holds true when comparing more complex, less frequent structures with simpler, more common ones.
- Processing costs associated with displacement were observed, supporting the principle's validity.
- A key finding is that linguistic gaps appeared before their corresponding fillers in the analyzed structures.
Conclusions:
- The minimal chain principle provides a valid framework for understanding the processing costs associated with linguistic displacement in Spanish.
- The ambiguity of the particle "se" contributes to the complexity of processing these varied grammatical structures.
- The directionality of gap-filler processing, with gaps preceding fillers, is a significant characteristic of the analyzed constructions.
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