Comprehension of relative clauses with psychological predicates in Spanish

Abstract

This study outlines an auditory comprehension task of relative clauses with Argentine Spanish psychological (e.g., gustar ‘to like’) and activity (e.g., sonreír ‘to smile’) predicates. Our results show that in the case of activity predicates, subject relative clauses were easier to comprehend than object relative ones. Contrastingly, in the case of psychological predicates, object relative clauses were easier than subject relative ones. This outcomes point to a structure-dependent account of the subject-object processing asymmetries, in line with the Featural Relativized Minimality theory (Rizzi, 2004), and are also consistent with the notion that not all languages exhibit the same pattern of subject-object asymmetry.