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Publications (41)
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the relationship between grammars and processing systems in light of the various forms of experimental research (especially of an electrophysiological nature) that has been conducted in the last fifteen years or so. First, the notion of ‘processing strategy’ or ‘heuristics processing’ is considered followe...
The study of the representation and processing of grammatical gender during language production has encountered mixed results regarding which conditions must be met to observe gender effects and whether these reflect the selection of gender values or competition between elements of agreement. The answer seems to depend on the number of determiners...
The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a larg...
In this study we examine the extent to which aspects such as the emotionality coded in words may interfere with the processing of gender agreement errors in a sentence grammaticality judgement task. We follow the methodological pattern of our previous experiments, using consistently the same kind of structure and task (gender agreement) and only em...
There is extensive evidence showing that bilinguals activate the lexical and the syntactic representations of both languages in a nonselective way. However, the extent to which the lexical and the syntactic levels of representations interact during second language (L2) sentence processing and how those interactions are modulated by L2 proficiency r...
In this paper I try to establish bidirectional links between the grammar and the processing (especially production) of agreement in order to provide the broad strokes of a psychologically viable theory of agreement. I start by arguing that full encapsulation and full interactivity in agreement operations are not realistic options. The question ther...
Galician has been in contact with Spanish since the very origins of both languages. Galician and Spanish are strongly structurally, genetically and typologically related. As the intensity of the contact has been growing and the number of bilingual speakers has been steadily increasing along the 20th century, more and more grammatical Spanish featur...
Agreement has always posed a puzzle to both linguists and psycholinguists because, both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically, grammatical biases and processing biases exhibit a seemingly capricious mixture of form regulation and semantic interference. English in particular is famous for the latter. This work explores the thesis that agreem...
The present article reports an ERP study with two experiments designed to assess the influence of emotional adjectives on sentence processing by means of a gender agreement (grammaticality) judgment task. Participants were shown transitive sentences in Spanish presented word-by-word, with a complex object-NP consisting of a noun + an adjective + so...
This paper is an attempt to tackle the idea of opportunism in language processing seriously – and its implications for language theory if one is to avoid what Poeppel and Embick (2005) call “interdisciplinary cross-sterilization”, that is the failure of linguistics and psycholinguistics to communicate with each other. It is also an attempt to force...
Essentially, noun phrases are beams of formal features, like case or arbitrary gender, and semantic features, like number, animacy, or biologically-based gender. This means that when such nominal elements are embedded in the structure of the sentence, their features interact with that structure in many ways. The main purpose of this work is to expl...
This paper addresses the notion of close apposition. It begins by analyzing the quintessential appositive construction the poet Burns, arguing that such strings do not have a stable internal structure. This conclusion can be applied to other so-called close appositions, such as we boys, but not to similar-looking structures like my friend Burns or...
Previous studies have provided evidence of the brain's sensitivity to gender agreement violations using the technique of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Other studies have explored ERP patterns evoked by emotional words in isolation. This study investigates the time course of the processing of emotional words embedded in a sentence context u...
An eye-tracking experiment examined the processing of gender and number agreement in the comprehension of subject–verb-adjective sentences in Spanish. We used complex subject NPs made up of two nouns of the sort which is known to cause frequent attraction/proximity concord mistakes in production (e.g. *the name of the boys are German). The effects...
The purpose of this paper is to examine psycholinguistic work on attraction with a view to enriching our knowledge of the grammar of agreement. Following Franck et al. (2006), I assume that the different theories of agreement should relate to the way speakers err when they implement agreement operations. As an aberrant computation of the mind, attr...
The nature of agreement has been the topic of extensive debate in the recent literature of both linguistics and psycholinguistics. In contrast to either fully syntactic or fully semantic accounts, so-called ‘constraint-satisfaction models’ (Haskell
et al.
2010, among others) posit that all grammatical encoding is subject to a number of influences (...
We report three sentence completion experiments in which we manipulate the emotional dimension of the nouns in a complex noun phrase (NP) that precedes a relative clause (RC), as in the classic ambiguity in Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony. The aim was to see whether nouns such as orgy or genocide affect the well-estab...
Despite the abundant corpus-based research on full-inversion constructions in which the subject follows the entire verb phrase in a declarative clause, the analysis of this construction in the spoken mode has traditionally been neglected since it has been suggested that natural speech is not a good source of inversions. The article shows that speec...
The present paper focuses on the role of animacy in the processing of relative clauses (RCs) after complex NPs. We follow research by the Desmet et al. team on Dutch in exploring the role of animacy in Spanish RCs. We present data from a corpus study and two self-paced experiments and we compare the three studies and the Dutch and Spanish results....
The range of structures commonly classed as close appositives forms a rich ecological niche where each construction relates to the other constructions forming a dense network of taxonomic and inheritance ties (Goldberg 1995). As a first approximation to the concept of close apposition, however, the structure of that network falls outside the scope...
Agreement lies at the heart of sentence structure in that it usually codifies the formal link between the subject and the predicate. In a way, although not strictly necessary, agreement tends to be what signals that a clause has been created. However, linguists and psycholinguists disagree as to whether this core process is essentially a semantic o...
The recovery of pieces of information that are not linguistically expressed is a constant feature of the process of language comprehension. In the processing literature, such missing information is generally referred to as “gaps”. Usually, one resolves gaps by finding “fillers” in either the sentence or the context. For instance, in Peter seemed to...
Two experiments were carried out to investigate the processing of the empty category PRO and the time-course of this in Spanish. Eye movements were recorded while participants read sentences in which a matrix clause was followed by a subordinate infinitival clause, so that the subject or the object of the main clause could act as controller of PRO,...
The concept of apposition remains an obscure notion despite the fact that it has figured prominently in the history of grammar. Modern grammatical frameworks have done very little if anything to clarify it, and, with very few exceptions, they continue to merely invoke it in passing when dealing with grey areas in the study of other phenomena. Chara...
The aim of this paper is to analyze the pros and cons of the relationship between theories of grammar and psycholinguistic research conducted in laboratories. It is argued that current optimism about the benefits that psycholinguistic research may bring to those interested in the nature of language may be hard to reconcile with the difficulties the...
Linguists with an interest in psycholinguistic research on the processing of language often feel concerned that psycholinguistic experiments truly reflect important aspects of the nature of language and not artefactualdimensions of the methodologies used in them. In this paper I intend to argue that one of the main theories of language comprehensio...
Algunos lingüistas interesados en la investigación realizada sobre el procesamiento lingüístico suelen expresar su preocupación de que los experimentos psicolingúísticos reflejen verdaderamente aspectos importantes de la naturaleza de la facultad lingüística humana, y no sesgos incontrolados de las metodologías con las que se realizan. En este artí...
This paper examines McCawley's recent account (1998: 467–478) of the distinction between reduced relative clauses and several appositive structures. One of McCawley's main goals is to show that structures which are commonly ‘lumped together’ under the name apposition can be subdivided into two different things: namely -structures, which are canonic...
This paper seeks to redefine apposition, a term that is often used in the literature with a remarkable lack of precision. Starting from paradigmatic instances of apposition (Romulus,
the
legendary
founder;
Santiago,
the
capital
of
Galicia), the main resemblances to the paradigm are analysed in an attempt to measure the validity of a general syntact...
This is a revised and much expanded version of a paper presented for the XVIII AEDEAN Conference (Alcalá de Henares, December 1994) The aim of this paper is to provide syntactic evidence that left-dislocated NPs (LDs) do not belong inside the structure of the sentences with which they are usually associated. It is argued here that the relationship...
Projects
Project (1)
The aim of this research project is to contribute to an understanding of the processes that take place when we humans process the
syntactic structure of language. That broad objective usually translates into a study of the notion of informational encapsulation. Applied to
syntactic structure, this means that we will be studying to what extent grammar is an independent module of the mind. Zooming in more,
we will scrutinize a central grammatical phenomenon, namely agreement, both in Spanish and in English.
