Exploring the Timing of Online Processing of Locative Constructions With Spanish Copulas Ser and Estar

This study investigates how the semantic restrictions of Spanish copulas (ser and estar) impact the online processing of locative constructions. The choice of copula depends on the eventiveness of the subject noun: ser is used with event nouns (e.g., La reunión es en la biblioteca / The meeting isser in the library), while estar is used with object nouns (e.g., El libro está en la biblioteca / The book isESTAR in the library). By manipulating copula type (ser vs. estar) and noun type (event vs. object), we created compatible (ser + event, estar + object) and incompatible combinations. The results from a self-paced reading task and an eye-tracking experiment converge in showing that event nouns were read faster after ser, and object nouns were read faster after estar. These findings suggest that readers rapidly use the copula’s semantic restrictions to anticipate the eventiveness of upcoming nouns during sentence processing.