Moisés Betancort & Manuel Carreiras
University of La Laguna
An Empty Category (EC) is an element that lacks of phonological input and establishes a relationship to an antecedent. Our interest focuses on PRO, a type of EC that appears together with infinitives and gerunds. When the parser finds an EC must link it to its antecedent that controls and fills it. Two theoretical positions are considered to explain how EC are processed: Two-stage models for which only syntax leads the initial processing of the EC (Rayner, Carlson & Frazier, 1983; Clifton & Frazier, 1986) and those models that assume a constraint satisfaction process (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey & Carlson, 1995; McDonald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994). This study reports three eye-tracking experiments investigating how PRO is processed in Spanish. In Experiment 1 the plausibility as a cue to recover the right antecedent was manipulated as in sentences (1).
| (1) |
La anciana/el ladrón vio al ladrón/la anciana [PRO] saltando sigiloso por la
ventana. "The old woman/the thief saw the thief/the old woman [PRO] jumping silently (masc) out of the window." |
In Experiment 2 verb control information (object and subject control verbs) was manipulated, as in (2).
| (2) |
Juan prometió/aconsejó a Maria [PRO] mantenerse más
informado(a) del problema de la empresa. "Juan promised/advised Maria [PRO] to keep more updated (masc/fem) about the problem of the company." |
Experiment 3 used the prepositions 'por' and 'para' to force a bias either into causal or final reading, thus compelling the controller of PRO to be the object or the subject of the main sentence.
| (3) |
Julia dejó a Luis por/para [PRO] olvidarse de todo y [PRO] marcharse de
monje/a a un monasterio. "Julia left Luis for/*in order to [PRO] forgetting/forget everything and [PRO] becoming/become a monk/nun in a monastery." |
In all experiments sentences were disambiguated by gender agreement. Two-stage models predict that semantic plausibility and control information should not influence initial syntactic analyses. In contrast, constraint-based theories predict a competition between two or more syntactic analysis equally activated by initially using all sources of information. The data showed that PRO is processed on-line and related to its antecedent as fast as possible. Object antecedent sentences were initially processed faster than subject antecedent sentences, indicating that extra-syntactic information is not used initially and no competition occurred. However, when the syntactic analysis does not fit with extra-syntactic information, a reanalysis is triggered. Furthermore, not all sources of information do influence the process at the same time, being quickly used when available.
References
Boland, J. E., Tanenhaus, M. K., Garnsey, S. M., & Carlson, G. N. (1995). Verb argument structure in parsing and interpretation: Evidence from wh-questions. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 774-806
Rayner, K., Carlson, M., & Frazier, L. (1983). The interaction of syntax and semantics during sentence processing: Eye movements in the analysis of semantically biased verbs. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 358-374
Clifton, C., & Frazier, L. (1986). The use of syntactic information in filling gaps. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15, 209-224
McDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). Lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703
Trueswell, J. C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1994). Toward a lexicalist framework for constrained-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. In C. Clifton, K. Rayner, & L. Frazier (Eds.), Perspectives on Sentence Processing. Hillsdale, NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.