Processing Argument Structure: Eye- tracking Evidence from Spanish Native Speakers in the visual world Paradigm.

• Autores: Beatriz Gómez Vidal
• Directores de la Tesis: Itziar Laka Mugarza (dir. tes.), Miren Arantzeta Pérez (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad del País Vasco - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea ( España ) en 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Isabel Fraga Carou (presid.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Lingüística / Linguistics por la Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
• Calificación: Sobresaliente Cum Laude
• Materias:
  • Ciencias de las artes y las letras
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: ADDI
• Resumen

  • Psycholinguistic research on argument structure and thematic roles is essential to the understanding of language at the predicate level. Despite their centrality to linguistic theory, few studies have investigated thematic roles in processing directly (Bourguignon et al., 2012; Hafri, Papafragou and Trueswell, 2013; Kowalski and Huang, 2017; Sauppe et al., 2023; Ünal et al., 2024), resulting in little evidence regarding their processing patterns and underlying structure as cognitive categories. In this dissertation, I seek to fill this gap by investigating the processing of sentential subjects in different argument structures in Spanish. Specifically, I investigate two factors (thematic role and prototypicality) that affect the post-verbal activation of sentential subjects in the mental representation of speakers during sentence comprehension, and how these patterns can inform on the structure of thematic roles as cognitive categories. Using eye tracking and the Visual World Paradigm, I carried out three psycholinguistic experiments exploring (a) the impact of thematic role (Chapter 2) and prototypicality (Chapter 3) in subject processing patterns in unaccusative, unergative and transitive predicates, and (b) the processing of sentential subjects in psychological predicates to investigate the representation of thematic roles as cognitive categories (Chapter 4). Results show a general agent preference, modulated by prototypicality, in the processing of sentential subjects in unaccusative, unergative and transitive sentences. Additionally, I show evidence supporting a proto-role theory of thematic roles, finding that agent subjects and experiencer subjects share a common processing pattern, different from that of theme subjects.