CNL Lunch

Leticia Pablos

Processing Long-Distance Dependencies in Spanish

Thursday April 24th, 12:30pm, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

In this study we use experimental evidence from Spanish to investigate how long-distance dependencies are interpreted. In previous literature on real-time construction of long-distance dependencies, there has been controversy surrounding whether a fronted phrase (e.g. topic or wh-phrase) receives its argument role via direct association with a verb, or mediated by a separately created argument position projected by the verb (Bever&McElree 1988; MacDonald 1989).

Although in head-initial languages like English, long-distance dependencies are created at the verb (Stowe 1986; Pickering & Barry 1991; Boland et al. 1995) the issue of whether the association is direct or mediated has not been settled since the verb triggers projection of argument positions and that is compatible with either theory (Gibson & Hickok 1993).

This can be resolved by searching for effects of dependency formation associated with argument positions preceding the verb of a clause, thus ruling out the direct association possibility. In our study, we address it using long-distance dependencies in Spanish whose tail consists of an overt preverbal clitic pronoun and investigate whether dependency formation is mediated by clitic pronouns. To shed light on the processing of these types of dependencies that involve fronted phrases in Spanish, a self-paced reading experiment was conducted on 56 Spanish speakers.