Subjects are not all alike: Eye-tracking the agent preference in Spanish

Beatriz Gómez-Vidal1, Miren Arantzeta1, Jon Paul Laka2

  • 1The Bilingual Mind Research Group, Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain.

Plos One
|August 3, 2022
PubMed
Summary

This study on sentence processing found that agent subjects are processed faster than theme subjects, supporting the Agent First Hypothesis. This reveals a distinction in how unaccusative and unergative predicates are understood.

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