The processing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish: An eye-tracking study

摘要

A normative study and an eye-tracking experiment investigated the influence of animacy on theprocessing of subject and object relative clauses in Spanish. The results showed that object relativeclauses caused more difficulty than subject relative clauses, but that animacy modulated this prefer-ence. The overall pattern was similar to findings in other languages. However, because of the syntacticcharacteristics of Spanish relative clauses, the results give novel insights into the processing mechan-isms that underlie relative clause processing.