Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process: Evidence from Basque

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 115; no. 1; pp. 79 - 92
• Main Authors: Carreiras, Manuel, Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni, Vergara, Marta, de la Cruz-Pavía, Irene, Laka, Itziar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.04.2010; Elsevier
• Subjects: Alignment; Ambiguity; Analysis of Variance; Attention - physiology; Basque; Basque language; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Chinese; Clause; Cognitive science; Comprehension - physiology; Electroencephalography; Electrophysiology; Ergativity; Event Related Potentials; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Experiments; Form Classes (Languages); Functional Laterality - physiology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammar; Humans; Indo European Languages; Information processing; Language; Language Comparison; Language Grammars; Language Processing; Linguistic research; Linguistics; Parsing; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Relative Clauses; Structural Analysis (Linguistics); Task Analysis; Parsing; Relative clauses; Ergativity; Human; Disambiguation; Central nervous system; Electrophysiology; Cognition; Grammar; Experimental study; Encephalon; Reading; Language; Syntax; Event evoked potential
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2009.11.012

Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal relative clauses. A self-paced reading task was used in Experiments 1 and 2, while ERPs were recorded in Experiment 3. We used relative clauses that were ambiguous between an object or subject-gap interpretation and disambiguated later in the sentence. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that SR took longer to read than OR in the critical disambiguating region. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that SR produced larger amplitudes than OR in the P600 window immediately after reading the critical disambiguating word. Our results suggest that SR are not universally easier to process. They cast doubts on universal hypotheses and suggest that processing complexity may depend on language-specific aspects of grammar.