EARLY MAPPING OF COMPLEX DPS IN PREPOSITIONAL RELATIVE CLAUSES: interaction with metacognitive knowledge and working memory

Abstract

This study examines early mapping of complex DPs in prepositional relative clauses with for/to (‘para’), i.e. attributing the thematic role of beneficiary. The main question is whether the standard variant for this type of relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese (with preposition) as compared to the non-standard chopped variant (without a preposition) allows for early referent mapping, given the possibility of incremental integration of preceding contextual visual and linguistic information. A picture matching experiment was applied to 41 speakers of the standard variety of BP. Preceding visual and auditory linguistic context was presented in which a character participated in two distinct events (one event presented with a di-transitive verb and another presented with a transitive verb), involving distinct co-participants. We aimed to verify whether the presentation of a standard variant probe question, with the preposition, immediately following the visual and linguistic contextual scenes would benefit early identification of the referent expressed in the complex DP, compared to a non-standard prepositionless (chopped variant) probe question. Accuracy and Reaction Time (RT) with regards to the picture matching task were the dependent variables. We also intended to examine the influence of knowledge of standard grammar as well as verbal working memory on task performance. Participants were asked to try and click on the image matching the probe sentence containing the relative clause as soon as possible. Our results did not reveal any advantage for the use of the standard prepositional relative clause compared to the non-standard version in terms of referent anticipation. However, accuracy of image selection was significantly higher for standard relative clauses. Higher scores in the standard grammar test and the reading span test were positively correlated to RT(s) as well as accuracy (for the non-standard relative clause). Relative clause complexity, possible ambiguity of the non-standard chopped relative clauses and the limited sensitivity of the task in detecting potential early mapping are all factors that seem to affect the results.