On The Nature Of Clitics And Their Sensitivity To Number Attraction Effects
Pronominal dependencies have been shown to be more resilient to attraction effects than subject-verb agreement. We use this phenomenon to investigate whether antecedent-clitic dependencies in Spanish are computed like agreement or like pronominal dependencies. In Experiment 1, an acceptability judgm...
| Autores: | , , , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2017 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad del País Vasco |
| Repositorio: | Addi. Archivo Digital para la Docencia y la Investigación |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:addi.ehu.eus:10810/27629 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10810/27629 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | clitics agreement pronouns object agreement attraction effects sentence processing cue-based retrieval subject-verb agreement syntactic positive shift sentence comprehension brain potentials time-course grammatical gender processing gender memory retrieval working-memory ERP |
| Resumo: | Pronominal dependencies have been shown to be more resilient to attraction effects than subject-verb agreement. We use this phenomenon to investigate whether antecedent-clitic dependencies in Spanish are computed like agreement or like pronominal dependencies. In Experiment 1, an acceptability judgment self-paced reading task was used. Accuracy data yielded reliable attraction effects in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, only in singular (but not plural) clitics. Reading times did not show reliable attraction effects. In Experiment 2, we measured electrophysiological responses to violations, which elicited a biphasic frontal negativity-P600 pattern. Number attraction modulated the frontal negativity but not the amplitude of the P600 component. This differs from ERP findings on subject-verb agreement, since when the baseline matching condition obtained a biphasic pattern, attraction effects only modulated the P600, not the preceding negativity. We argue that these findings support cue-retrieval accounts of dependency resolution and further suggest that the sensitivity to attraction effects shown by clitics resembles more the computation of pronominal dependencies than that of agreement. |
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