Subject-object asymmetries in the processing of European Portuguese cleft structures

This study investigates the intervention effects on the processing of standard clefts by adult speakers of European Portuguese, focusing on the semantic feature of animacy. Using a self-paced reading task combined with a picture selection task, we manipulated the extraction types (subject vs. object) and the animacy of the clefted constituent (animate vs. inanimate). 40 participants took part in the study. We observed a processing and comprehension advantage for subject clefts over object clefts, regardless of animacy. There is also an advantage of the intersection of the animacy feature in object clefts, demonstrated by shortened reading times from the verb phrase onward. No effects of animacy on the assignment of thematic roles were found: the prototypical association of animacy with the subject did not significantly influence processing. Our results suggest that features relevant to the syntactic component such as the +N feature (shared by the object and the subject in all clefts) trigger stronger intervention effects than features that do not affect this component. It is thus plausible that different theoretical perspectives on intervention effects (featural Relativized Minimality and similarity-based interference models) complement each other, predicting that morphosyntactic features trigger stronger effects than semantic features.