Subjects are not all alike: Eye-tracking the agent preference in Spanish

ABSTRACT: Experimental research on argument structure has reported mixed results regarding the processing of unaccusative and unergative predicates. Using eye tracking in the visual world paradigm, this study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the processing distinction between agent and theme subjects. We considered two hypotheses. First, the Unaccusative Hypothesis states that unaccusative (theme) subjects involve a more complex syntactic representation than unergative (agent) subjects. It predicts a delayed reactivation of unaccusative subjects compared to unergatives after the presentation of the verb. Second, the Agent First Hypothesis states that the first ambiguous NP of a sentence will preferably be interpreted as an agent due to an attentional preference to

SUBMITTER: Gomez-Vidal B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9348668 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature