Argument Structure Complexity and its influence on the sentence processing in Spanish

The argument structure (AS) is the information that verbs have about syntactic and thematic roles. The objective of this work is to investigate how the effect of the complexity of EA is manifested in a Sentence Elicitation and a Grammatical Judgments task. A group of 62 native speakers of Rioplatense Spanish of different ages and levels of education participated in the study. The stimuli were made considering the number of obligatory arguments that a verb requires: 1, 2, and 3, and the canonicity in the syntactic-semantic mapping (intransitive inacusative vs. inergative). The findings suggest that the greater the number of arguments, the greater the difficulties, especially in subjects with low schooling. No differences were found between intransitive verbs. Results will be discussed in light of linguistic and neuropsycholinguistic hypotheses. The tasks from this study are part of a battery of morphosyntax assessment for people with aphasia.