Subject-object asymmetries in the processing of European Portuguese cleft structures : Assessing the role of animacy
Li, Xinyi (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Lobo, Maria (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Teixeira, Joana (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Additional title:	Subject-object asymmetries in the processing of European Portuguese cleft structures
Date:	2025
Abstract:	This study investigates the intervention effects on the processing of standard clefts by adult speakers of European Portuguese, focusing on the semantic feature of animacy. Using a self-paced reading task combined with a picture selection task, we manipulated the extraction types (subject vs. object) and the animacy of the clefted constituent (animate vs. inanimate). 40 participants took part in the study. We observed a processing and comprehension advantage for subject clefts over object clefts, regardless of animacy. There is also an advantage of the intersection of the animacy feature in object clefts, demonstrated by shortened reading times from the verb phrase onward. No effects of animacy on the assignment of thematic roles were found: the prototypical association of animacy with the subject did not significantly influence processing. Our results suggest that features relevant to the syntactic component such as the +N feature (shared by the object and the subject in all clefts) trigger stronger intervention effects than features that do not affect this component. It is thus plausible that different theoretical perspectives on intervention effects (featural Relativized Minimality and similarity-based interference models) complement each other, predicting that morphosyntactic features trigger stronger effects than semantic features.
Note:	Altres ajuts: Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, project UID/03213 (Linguistics Research Centre of NOVA University Lisbon)
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Intervention effects ; Animacy ; Cleft ; European portuguese ; Sentence parsing
Published in:	Isogloss, Vol. 11 Núm. 1 (2025) , p. 1-27 (Articles) , ISSN 2385-4138

Adreça original: https://revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/article/view/v11-n1-li-lobo-teixeira
DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.482

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