Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Spanish: Syntactic Intervention on Headed and False Free Relatives

Authors

  • Marisol Murujosa University of Buenos Aires, National Scientific and Technical Research Council
  • Carolina Gattei Pontifical Catholic Argentinean University, Torcuato Di Tella University, University of Buenos Aires
  • Diego Shalom University of Buenos Aires, Torcuato Di Tella University, National Scientific and Technical Research Council
  • Yamila Sevilla University of Buenos Aires, National Scientific and Technical Research Council

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.lyl.n79a05

Keywords:

sentence comprenhension, relative clauses, syntactic intervention, headed relatives, false free relatives

Abstract

In this study, an auditory comprehension task of headed and false free relative clauses (RC) in Argentinean
Spanish is presented. The results show that in both cases object RCs were more difficult to comprehend than subject ORs. This fact is consistent with the proposal of syntactic intervention by inclusion of morphosyntactic features (Rizzi, 2004). Both, headed and semi-free object RCs, are lexically restricted by a lexical element with the feature [+N] and this element interferes in the establishment of the syntactic dependency
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Author Biographies

Marisol Murujosa, University of Buenos Aires, National Scientific and Technical Research Council

Degree in Letters from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Doctoral fellow at the Conicet at the Institute of Linguistics of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Her research focuses on language processing in adults, particularly variables that contribute to the difficulty of processing sentences with distance syntactic dependencies.

Carolina Gattei, Pontifical Catholic Argentinean University, Torcuato Di Tella University, University of Buenos Aires

Degree in Letters from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), Master in Clinical Linguistics from the Universitat Potsdam (Germany) and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). Associate Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Physics of Buenos Aires of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and the Laboratory of Neurosciences of University Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina). Her doctoral thesis focuses on the role of the orational order and the type of verb in the understanding of simple events of Spanish. Today, she investigates how the previous context affects the understanding of sentences with different informational structure.

Diego Shalom, University of Buenos Aires, Torcuato Di Tella University, National Scientific and Technical Research Council

Degree and Doctor of Physical Sciences from the Balseiro Institute of the National University of Cuyo (Argentina). He is a Researcher of Conicet at the Institute of Physics of Buenos Aires of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires and the Laboratory of Neurosciences of Torcuato Di Tella University (Argentina). His research areas include studying eye movements that occur during reading, to try to understand how linguistic information is processed, manipulated, and organized.

Yamila Sevilla, University of Buenos Aires, National Scientific and Technical Research Council

Degree in Letters and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Buenos Aires. She is a Researcher of Conicet at the Institute of Linguistics of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Buenos Aires. She is a professor of neurolinguistics at the same university and has taught numerous undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Psycho and Neurolinguistics. His areas of research are the coding and manipulation of syntactic structures in language processing, predictive processes and relationships between working memory and prayer comprehension, morphostoctic difficulties in aphasia, as well as initial literacy and reading learning issues.

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Published

2021-04-15

How to Cite

Murujosa, M., Gattei, C., Shalom, D., & Sevilla, Y. (2021). Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Spanish: Syntactic Intervention on Headed and False Free Relatives. Lingüística Y Literatura, 42(79), 95–111. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.lyl.n79a05

Issue

Vol. 42 No. 79 (2021): Vol. 42, 79 (2021): JANUARY-JUNE, 2021

Section

Linguistic studies

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