Lexico-Semantic Influence on Syntactic Processing: An Eye-Tracking Study with Spanish Relative Clauses

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Sentence processing models often debate the primacy of syntactic versus semantic information.
• Spanish relative clauses (RCs) offer a unique case due to varying relativizer frequency and semantics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the early interaction between lexicosemantic and syntactic information during Spanish RC comprehension.
• To determine if word meaning influences sentence processing before or concurrently with grammatical structure integration.

Main Methods:

• Corpus analysis of Spanish relative clauses and their relativizers.
• Eye-tracking experiment to measure online comprehension of restrictive and non-restrictive RCs.
• Analysis of fixation durations and reading patterns at different sentence regions.

Main Results:

• Lexicosemantic information significantly impacts early stages of sentence processing, affecting relativizer activation.
• Semantic features of relativizers and RC types influence integration into syntactic structures.
• Different regions of the sentence show distinct constraints based on the semantic role of the RC.

Conclusions:

• Evidence supports an interactive view of language processing, where multiple linguistic information types guide comprehension.
• Syntactic information alone does not solely drive sentence comprehension; semantic factors play a crucial early role.