This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle (Frazier, 1978), whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988). Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review of studies on Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance languages, we argue that the high-versus lowattachment difference across languages emerges cleanly only in off-line tasks, such as questionnaire studies, thus limiting the types of explanations for the cross-linguistic differences. We also advance an explanation for the high attachment preferences found in unspeeded questionnaire studies based on the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor, 1998a, 2002).
This study aims to connect data from ocular movements and reading aloud speech to syntactic and discursive properties of texts, in order to understand integrative cognitive processes during reading for understanding and to identify prosodic and eye movements' indicators of reading fluency. Assuming that in reading aloud there is a close interaction between syntax structure and speech prosody, we collected eye movements and reading speech data from 17 native EP speakers. Eye movements and reading speech produced simultaneously were analyzed and our results show that eyes and voice are both responsive to text complexity and to syntactic and discursive critical loci, as key points of information integration.
Neste estudo, analisamos o processamento e a interpretação de sujeitos nulos e plenos em PE e em PB na retoma de antecedentes que ocupam diferentes posições estruturais. Resultados: função sintática e posição estrutural influenciam a resolução da correferência em PE; em PB, o nulo é mais facilmente interpretado como correferente com o Sujeito ou com o antecedente maispróximo que o comanda.
In this study, in a written sentence completion experiment, we contrast European and Brazilian Portuguese in what concerns the production of null, overt pronouns and full NPs, as subjects of verb complement clauses, to refer to the previously mentioned entities (or to extra-discursive referents). Results show that overall participants prefer to use null pronouns and that these pronouns are preferentially used to refer to the closest NP, especially in BP. Moreover, overt pronouns and full NPs are hardly used, being the later more frequent than the former, especially to refer to extra-discursive referents. Although the preference to refer to the closest subject with the null pronoun is in line with previous studies, high frequency of null pronouns and low frequency of overt ones in BP is not. We propose that these results might be explained by the characteristics of both the tested conditions and of the participants tested in our study.
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