Yetano, I. 1 , Duñabeitia, J. A. 2 & Laka, I. 3
1 ELEBILAB. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
2 Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain, and Language. Donostia, Spain.
3 Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
Morphological case marking information has been proved to be very useful for the form-to-meaning mapping process, especially in verb final structures. However, arguments are not always unambiguously case-marked. In a visual-world eye-movement experiment we studied the processing preferences shown by speakers for ambiguously case-marked arguments in Basque. We monitored the eye movements of forty native speakers of Basque to objects in visual scenes during auditory sentence comprehension. Experimental spoken sentences contained an initial animate NP argument which was morphologically ambiguous between ergative case (a singular agentive subject) and absolutive case (plural object/intransitve subject). Target referential NPs were depicted both by single-entity objects as well as by several-entity objects. Argument disambiguation occurred at the verb, at sentence final position. Results revealed that at the ambiguously case-marked NP participants tended to fixate on the object depicting more than one entity more often than to the single entity, probably due to the visual salience of the plural object. Eye-tracking at the disambiguating verb window showed refixations to the objects referencing the initial NP, but interestingly, the proportion of these refixations was higher when the verb disambiguated the local ambiguity towards the plural object/intransitve subject (absolutive case) than when disambiguating towards a singular agentive subject (ergative case). Since refixations are usually associated with linguistic reanalysis processes, these results indicate that Basque speakers preferably interpret the ambiguously case-marked NP as singular agentive subject (ergative). Overall, the findings suggest that, in ergative languages like Basque, speakers interpret an initial ambiguous animate NP as the higher ranking argument of the event, and therefore, that there is an agent-initial processing preference.