Lobina, D. & Garcia-Albea, J.
Departament de Psicologia/CRAMC, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Recursion is a property of the language faculty at various levels. First, it is at the core of its computational system. Secondly, it is a property of the generated structures, in the sense that all phrases appear to follow the same geometry: a [Specifier [Head-Complement(s)] configuration. Thus, a sentence is a combination of embedded phrases of this type and we here investigate if this results in a recursive application of the parser. As a metric, the memory load of assembling phrases in mono-clausal Subject-Verb-Object sentences was assessed by employing the click-detection paradigm -a technique sensitive to cognitive loads within and between clauses. 60 pairs of Spanish sentences, containing a longer phrase in either the Subject or Object position were employed, and three click positions (controlled for length) were determined. Results show that reaction times (RTs) are slower at the beginning of sentences, but there is a robust linear decrease in RTs between positions. An ANOVA analysis determines that both the sentence type and the click position factors are significant, but there is no interaction effect. Nevertheless, all within-sentence-type comparisons were significant, while only the second position -the S-HC frontier- proved to be significant across sentence-type, suggesting a recursive process.