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The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish counterpart) by Spanish speaker learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Results showed that: 1) EDCs were better recognized than ERCs by L2 learners, but highly proficient participants were closer to English native speakers' performance, 2) Less proficient EFLs comprehended EDCs better than those ERC subtypes that were further from Spanish (ERC Property and Fake Reflexive). We interpret our findings in terms of an interlinguistic distance gradient, where those constructions present (EDC) or closer (ERC-Path) to L1 are more readily acquired. This effect seems more prominent at lower EFL proficiencies, and fades as proficiency increases, evolving towards a more native-like pattern.

We present an eyetracking study that investigates how linking is achieved during real-time comprehension of Spanish sentences with causative psych verbs and alternative case marking. This group of verbs lead to verbs’ argument structures that require direct or inverse syntax-to-semantics linking according to the type of case marking assigned to their object. The study aimed at disentangling whether processing inverse linking was more costly than direct linking, and exploring how incremental argument interpretation takes place when lexemes that accept several case markings are used. Results showed that during incremental comprehension, inverse linking is more difficult than direct linking, irrespective of word order. As for argument interpretation, the current study partially replicated the results of previous studies conducted in this language using different verb types. Findings are discussed under the light of different psycholinguistic models addressing case marking processing and incremental linking.

Electrophysiology studies have identified two event-related potentials that are modulated by predictive processes during language comprehension: the N400 and a frontal positivity. The N400 is smaller when words are presented within highly restrictive sentences, indicating reduced lexical retrieval costs. Violations of strong predictions generate larger frontal positivities, possibly reflecting inhibitory processes. More skilled comprehenders may exhibit enhanced predictive processing, but this possibility has seldom been investigated with event-related potentials (ERPs). We analyzed the association between predictability ERP modulations and reading comprehension abilities. Twenty-four undergraduate students were exposed to strongly and weakly constraining sentences, ending with an expected or unexpected final word. Their comprehension skills were assessed with a cloze task. Better comprehenders showed smaller N400s for expected words, and larger posterior positivities for unexpected endings, in strongly constraining contexts. These effects correlated with reading comprehension scores. The results suggest that better comprehenders take more advantage of predictions to reduce retrieval costs, and allocate more resources to postlexical integration processes.

The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish counterpart) by Spanish speaker learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Results showed that: 1) EDCs were better recognized than ERCs by L2 learners, but highly proficient participants were closer to English native speakers' performance, 2) Less proficient EFLs comprehended EDCs better than those ERC subtypes that were further from Spanish (ERC Property and Fake Reflexive). We interpret our findings in terms of an interlinguistic distance gradient, where those constructions present (EDC) or closer (ERC-Path) to L1 are more readily acquired. This effect seems more prominent at lower EFL proficiencies, and fades as proficiency increases, evolving towards a more native-like pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both "early" and "late" eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrophysiology studies have identified two event‐related potentials that are modulated by predictive processes during language comprehension: the N400 and a frontal positivity. The N400 is smaller when words are presented within highly restrictive sentences, indicating reduced lexical retrieval costs. Violations of strong predictions generate larger frontal positivities, possibly reflecting inhibitory processes. More skilled comprehenders may exhibit enhanced predictive processing, but this possibility has seldom been investigated with event‐related potentials (ERPs). We analyzed the association between predictability ERP modulations and reading comprehension abilities. Twenty‐four undergraduate students were exposed to strongly and weakly constraining sentences, ending with an expected or unexpected final word. Their comprehension skills were assessed with a cloze task. Better comprehenders showed smaller N400s for expected words, and larger posterior positivities for unexpected endings, in strongly constraining contexts. These effects correlated with reading comprehension scores. The results suggest that better comprehenders take more advantage of predictions to reduce retrieval costs, and allocate more resources to postlexical integration processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an eye-tracking experiment that examined argument linking and the role of prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension by testing the interplay between word order and verb type. Previous evidence from a self-paced reading study (Gattei, Dickey, Wainselboim, & París, 2015). showed that comprehenders use morphosyntactic information to form predictions about the thematic structure of the upcoming verb. In this study we focussed on the time course of this process. Results showed an interaction between verb type and word order for late eye movement measures but not for early eye movement measures. Participants regressed more and for longer time when word order did not match the canonical order for each verb class. This interaction is observed from the verb region onwards, independently of word order. We interpret that these effects take place due to the misinterpretation of the prominence status of the preverbal argument, leading to differential reading strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linking is the theory that captures the mapping of the semantic roles of lexical arguments to the syntactic functions of the phrases that realize them. At the sentence level, linking allows us to understand “who did what to whom” in an event. In Spanish, linking has been shown to interact with word order, verb class, and case marking. The current study aims to provide the first piece of experimental evidence about the interplay between word order and verb type in Spanish. We achieve this by adopting role and reference grammar and the extended argument dependency model. Two different types of clauses were examined in a self-paced reading task: clauses with object–experiencer psychological verbs and activity verbs. These types of verbs differ in the way that their syntactic and semantic structures are linked, and thus they provide interesting evidence on how information that belongs to the syntax–semantics interface might influence the predictive and integrative processes of sentence comprehension with alternative word orders. Results indicate that in Spanish, comprehension and processing speed is enhanced when the order of the constituents in the sentence mirrors their ranking on a semantic hierarchy that encodes a verb's lexical semantics. Moreover, results show that during online comprehension, predictive mechanisms based on argument hierarchization are used rapidly to inform the processing system. Our findings corroborate already existing cross-linguistic evidence on the issue and are briefly discussed in the light of other sentence-processing models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]