Examinando por Autor "Laka Mugarza, Itziar"

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  • Miniatura
    Ítem
    On the interplay of segmentation cues in adult OV/VO bilinguals: prosody, frequency and context language
    (Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa = Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia, 2023) Cruz-Pavía, Irene de la ; Elordieta Alcibar, Gorka; Laka Mugarza, Itziar
    The present study investigated the role of phrasal prosody in speech segmenta-tion in adult bilingual speakers of two languages with opposite basic word orders: Basque and Spanish (Object-Verb and Verb-Object, respectively). We created a structurally ambiguous arti-ficial language (AL) that allowed two possible parses, mimicking the order characteristic of OV and VO languages, and enriched it with the prosodic cue associated to languages with an OV order: a pitch contrast, in which the element receiving prominence within phrases has higher pitch than the non-prominent elements. We tested highly proficient L1Basque-L2Spanish and L1Spanish-L2Basque speakers on their segmentation preferences of the AL, addressing both groups in their respective L1 during the study. Analysis of their segmentation preferences re-vealed that the presence of OV prosody modulated —but did not determine— their parsing of the ambiguous AL, as both groups of bilinguals exhibited a significantly greater preference for the segmentation associated to OV languages than two similar groups presented with a pro-sodically flat variant of the same AL in de la Cruz-Pavía et al. (2022). These results confirm that phrasal prosody is an available segmentation cue for adult bilinguals, but suggests that it is not a salient segmentation cue in this population.
  • Miniatura
    Ítem
    Subjects are not all alike: eye-tracking the agent preference in Spanish
    (Public Library of Science, 2022-08-03) Gómez Vidal, Beatriz; Arantzeta Pérez, Miren; Laka Mugarza, Jon Paul; Laka Mugarza, Itziar
    Experimental research on argument structure has reported mixed results regarding the processing of unaccusative and unergative predicates. Using eye tracking in the visual world paradigm, this study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the processing distinction between agent and theme subjects. We considered two hypotheses. First, the Unaccusative Hypothesis states that unaccusative (theme) subjects involve a more complex syntactic representation than unergative (agent) subjects. It predicts a delayed reactivation of unaccusative subjects compared to unergatives after the presentation of the verb. Second, the Agent First Hypothesis states that the first ambiguous NP of a sentence will preferably be interpreted as an agent due to an attentional preference to agents over themes. It predicts a larger reactivation of agent subjects than themes. We monitored the time course of gaze fixations of 44 native speakers across a visual display while processing sentences with unaccusative, unergative and transitive verbs. One of the pictures in the visual display was semantically related to the sentential subject. We analyzed fixation patterns in three different time frames: the verb frame, the post-verb frame, and the global post-verbal frame. Results indicated that sentential subjects across the three conditions were significantly activated when participants heard the verb; this is compatible with observing a post-verbal reactivation effect. Time course and magnitude of the gaze-fixation patterns are fully compatible with the predictions made by the Agent First Hypothesis. Thus, we report new evidence for (a) a processing distinction between unaccusative and unergative predicates in sentence comprehension, and (b) an attentional preference towards agents over themes, reflected by a larger reactivation effect in agent subjects.