Microvariation in the division of labor between null- and overt-subject pronouns: the case of Italian and Spanish

AbstractIn Italian, null pronouns are typically interpreted toward antecedents in a prominent syntactic position, whereas overt pronouns prefer antecedents in lower positions. Interpretation preferences in Spanish are less clear. While comprehension and production have never been systematically compared in Italian and Spanish, here we look at the preferences for overt- and null-subject pronouns in the two languages using the same production and comprehension materials. Using an offline comprehension task with a group of Spanish and Italian speakers, we tested sentences where the type of pronoun (null vs. explicit) and position of the pronoun (anaphoric vs. cataphoric) are manipulated, to determine how context affects speakers' interpretations in the two languages. With two production tasks, we measured referential choice in controlled discourse contexts, linking the production patterns to the differences observed in comprehension. Our results indicate microvariation in the two null-subject languages, with Spanish following the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis but to a lesser degree than Italian. More specifically, in Spanish, the weaker object bias for overt pronouns parallels with a higher use of overt pronouns (and with fewer null pronouns) in contexts of topic maintenance

Disentangling Parsing and Grammar in Subject Pronouns Interpretation in Italian

In the present study, we investigate if and how null and overt subject pronouns interpretation preferences in Italian can be influenced by two factors: (i) the presence of c-commanding antecedents (Rizzi 2018) and (ii) the ‘impatient parser’ (Sorace and Filiaci 2006; Fedele and Kaiser 2014). To disentangle the effects of c-commanding antecedents and of the ‘impatient parser’, we compare experimental conditions differing for only one of the two factors. The comparison demonstrates that c-commanding antecedents influence the interpretation of null pronouns but not the interpretation of overt pronouns, while no effect of the impatient parser is found for either null or overt pronouns. In addition, we found that external referent interpretation preferences are modulated by Principle C effects for null and overt pronouns, albeit to different degrees. External referent choices also increase when an

Prediction at the Discourse Level in Spanish–English Bilinguals: An Eye-Tracking Study

In two experiments, we examine English monolinguals’ and Spanish-English bilinguals’ ability to predict an upcoming pronoun referent based on the Implicit Causality (IC) bias of the verb. In an eye-tracking experiment, the monolingual data show anticipation of the upcoming referent for NP1-bias verbs. For bilinguals, the same effect is found, showing that bilinguals are not slower than monolinguals at processing the information associated with the IC of the verb. In an off-line experiment, both groups showed knowledge of IC bias information for the verbs used in the eye-tracking experiment. Based on the findings of the two experiments, we show that highly proficient bilinguals have similar online and off-line predictions based on IC verb information than monolingual speakers

On-line processing of English which-questions by children and adults: a visual world paradigm study

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and wh -questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and non-syntactic information to resolve syntactic ambiguity by extending our understanding of number features as a cue for interpretation to which -subject and which -object questions. We compared children's and adults’ eye-movements to understand how this information shapes children's commitment to and revision of possible interpretations of these questions. The results showed that English-speaking adults and children both exhibit an initial preference to interpret an object- which question as a subject question. While adults quickly override this preference, children take significantly longer, showing an overall processing difficulty for object questions. Crucially, their recovery from an initially erroneous interpretation is speeded when disambiguating number agreement features are present

The impact of number mismatch and passives on the real-time processing of relative clauses

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998). In this paper we aim at contributing to the study of children's processing routines, examining the operations underlying the auditory processing of relative clauses in children compared to adults. English-speaking children (6–8;11) and adults participated in the study, which employed a self-paced listening task with a final comprehension question. The aim was to determine (i) the role of number agreement in object relative clauses in which the subject and object NPs differ in terms of number properties, and (ii) the role of verb morphology (active vs. passive) in subject relative clauses. Even though children's off-line accuracy was not always comparable to that of adults, analyses of reaction times results support the view that children have the same structural processing reflexes observed in adults

Comparison of modalities in SLI syntax: A study on the comprehension and production of non-canonical sentences

This study is a linguistic investigation of four preschool-aged Italian children with SLI (4:5–5:9), using more than one linguistic modality, with the aim of analyzing their performance with relative clauses (subject and object relatives). Linguistic abilities in comprehension and production do not overlap in children with SLI and in typical developing children, revealing characteristics related to distinctions between the modalities as well as certain properties of language impairment. While comprehension by children with SLI is comparable to age-matched peers, their production shows a wider range of variation, providing a useful source with which to evaluate syntactic competence. Typically developing children adopt many different strategies to avoid the more complex, object relative clauses. Children with SLI, however, do not and are unable to construct any kind of relative clause