Mauro Viganò (UniCA): ‘Interpreting the Object Relative Disadvantage: Experimental and Clinical Evidence from Italian and French’

Seminari del CLT

Divendres, 12 de juny de 2026
Hora 15:30
Aula 202, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres

Across several languages and populations, object relative clauses are consistently more difficult to comprehend than subject relatives. Yet the source, timing and underlying mechanisms of this “object disadvantage” remain debated. In this talk, I bring together experimental evidence from psycholinguistics and clinical neurolinguistics to pursue a unified explanation grounded in featural Relativised Minimality.
The first study investigates the incremental processing of Italian relative clauses by directly comparing two paradigms: a modified lexical maze task targeting the relative clause and a self-paced reading task. Using identical materials across experiments, we show that the object disadvantage is robust across methodologies. Crucially, the modified maze task reveals that the difficulty associated with object relatives emerges immediately after the complementiser and persists across subsequent regions. This early locus of difficulty was not detectable in the self-paced reading paradigm, highlighting the importance of methodological choices for investigating sentence processing. While frequency-based surprisal and memory-based integration accounts explain parts of the pattern, our findings are more consistent with explanations grounded in featural Relativised Minimality and cue-based retrieval approaches.
The second study examines the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in French-speaking individuals with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features. We test whether number dissimilarity between the head of the relative and the subject of the embedded clause reduces the object disadvantage, and whether this facilitation depends on the phonological audibility of singular versus plural verb inflection. Results show a clear object disadvantage in the nonfluent and logopenic variants, but not in the semantic variant. Critically, number dissimilarity facilitates comprehension of object relatives regardless of whether the number contrast is phonologically realised in the verb, that is, at the retrieval point. This pattern argues against a superficial reliance on overt morphological cues and instead supports an abstract syntactic account in terms of featural Relativised Minimality.
Taken together, these studies converge on a unified perspective: the object relative disadvantage reflects structural intervention effects that arise early during incremental parsing and are systematically modulated by morphosyntactic feature configurations.