Processing controlled PROs in Spanish

Processing Control Information in a Nominal Control Construction: An Eye-Tracking Study

“…Instead, they claim that a recency strategy is operative during the early parsing stages, such that the parser still prefers to assign a recent controller to PRO even though the control information is available in the early parsing stages (for further relevance of the recency effect in the context of related theories, see Frazier 1978;Sturt et al 2002). These previous studies, however, were based on predicational control constructions (Betancort et al 2006;Boland et al 1990;Demestre et al 1999;Bever and Sanz 1997;Mauner et al 1995). In contrast, there has been no study that investigated a recency effect in the processing of nominal control constructions, and so their on-line processing status is currently unclear.…”

“…Thus, the control construction with a shorter linear distance between PRO and its controller took significantly less time to process than the control construction with a longer linear distance between PRO and its controller. Betancort et al (2006) interpret this recency preference in the context of the Garden path model (Frazier 1987;Frazier and Clifton 1996). They argue that the Active filler strategy cannot be applied to constrain the initial parsing of a long-distance dependency in the control construction because the control construction does not involve any syntactic movement.…”

“…In order to examine the initial access, we aim to exploit the recency effect reported by Frazier et al (1983) and Betancort et al (2006), for other (non-nominal) types of control relations. Frazier et al (1983) and Betancort et al (2006) found that dependency formation in control constructions is affected by a recency preference; the parser prefers to assign a recent controller to PRO. Thus, the control construction with a shorter linear distance between PRO and its controller took significantly less time to process than the control construction with a longer linear distance between PRO and its controller.…”

“…However, despite much interest in sentences with long-distance dependencies in the field of psycholinguistics, control constructions have not received much attention, unlike whquestions or relative clauses, and there have been just a small number of processing studies on the construction (Bever and Sanz 1997;Betancort et al 2006;Boland et al 1990;Demestre et al 1999;Featherston et al 2000;Frazier et al 1983;Kwon et al 2010;Kwon and Sturt 2014;Mauner et al 1995;McElree and Bever 1989;Nicol 1988;Sag and Fodor 1995;Walenski 2002). Moreover, these studies have yielded mixed results.…”

“…However, as discussed in Boland et al (1990), the results in Frazier et al (1983) are based on whole-sentence reading times, and thus are inconclusive. In fact, using eye-tracking to examine control constructions in Spanish, Betancort et al (2006) found evidence for the early activation of control information. Putting irrelevant details aside, their study reported that different control constructions were associated with different levels of parsing difficulty, and that these effects were evident in early eye-movement measures (see also Boland et al 1990).…”