Information Structure and Word Order Canonicity in the Comprehension of Spanish Texts: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Carolina A Gattei,Luis A París,Diego E Shalom

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629724

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Word order alternation is a frequent feature in many languages across the world
When reading OVS sentences, participants required more time to read when the sentence included an activity verb. This interaction was present when using both self-paced reading and eye-tracking techniques. These studies support the hypothesis that during incremental parsing, readers use the morphosyntactic and semantic information provided by the first sentential argument to generate predictions about the verb type that will take place in the sentence according to the prominence status of that argument
We presented an exploratory study that evaluated the interaction between word order, lexico-semantic structure of the verb and information structure in the comprehension of Spanish texts

Summary

Introduction

Word order alternation is a frequent feature in many languages across the world. Several works have tried to explain the psycholinguistic principles that govern comprehension of alternative word orders. A Spanish cloze task has shown that while the appearance of a nominative-marked argument in first position leads readers to expect an activity verb, the appearance of a dative-marked argument in first position leads them to expect an Object Experiencer psychological verb (heareafter ObjExp psych verb, Gattei et al, 2015b, Experiment 2) The violation of these expectations generates higher error rates and response times, longer reading times and amount of regressions to previous regions (Gattei et al, 2015a, 2017), and differential neural correlates (Gattei et al, 2015b), even in the canonical word order of the language. A Spanish animate, nominative-marked, definite argument in first position will most likely be the Actor of an activity event, and an animate, dative-marked, definite argument in first position will most likely be the Experiencer of a psych state

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