Martorell, J. , Molinaro, N. & Mancini, S.
BCBL
Previous eye-tracking research suggests that syntactic predictions occur in certain syntactic contexts and are sensitive to parafoveal manipulations. However, no study has tested how both syntactic context and parafoveal processing contribute to syntactic-level predictions. Importantly, this issue is fundamental for understanding how syntactic predictions are generated during reading before words are fixated. In this (future) eye-tracking study in Spanish, we manipulate the expectation for a post-verbal noun by changing the pronoun (indirect-object pronoun "le" vs. direct-object pronoun "lo") from the syntactic context, where the presence of "le" requires a direct-object noun like "el libro" ("Ella le envió el libro", She to.him sent the book), and "lo" prohibits it (" *Ella lo envió el libro", *She it sent the book). Moreover, we also manipulate the syntactic status of the post-verbal noun: either contextually-predictable direct objects or unpredictable adverbs (like "el lunes", on Monday). Critically, these adverbs (days of the week) are visually similar to direct objects (article "el" + noun), such that low-level parafoveal information is controlled. We take the first-pass reading times (RT) of the verb and the earliest reading measures (skipping rates and first-fixation duration) of the article+noun region as the critical indexes of pre-activation. Our hypotheses are as follows: if low-level parafoveal processing operates along with the effects of syntactic context, "le" contexts should lead to (i) a predictive effect in the verb (longer RTs indexing syntactic pre-activation) and (ii) a processing facilitation in the article+noun for both post-verbal manipulations. However, if syntactic context interacts with high-level parafoveal information, we expect (i) a processing cost for the prohibited configurations ("lo" contexts preceding direct objects) both in the verb and in the article+noun , and (ii) a processing advantage for predicted direct objects, compared to unpredictable adverbs, with "le" contexts both in the verb and in the article+noun.