Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 23, 2026
Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: an eye-tracking study
Moisés Betancort1, Manuel Carreiras, Patrick Sturt
1Department of Psychobiology and Methodology, University of La Laguna, 39205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. moibemo@ull.es
Abstract:
A normative study and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of animacy on the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish. The results showed that object relative clauses caused more difficulty than subject relative clauses, but that animacy modulated this preference. The overall pattern was similar to findings in other languages. However, because of the syntactic characteristics of Spanish relative clauses, the results give novel insights into the processing mechanisms that underlie relative clause processing.
