Empty Categories Access Their Antecedents during Comprehension: Unaccusatives in Spanish

Spanish speakers who scan their syntactic representation to find a word from the subject NP in a just-comprehended sentence recognize the word faster in unaccusative-verb sentences than in unergative-verb sentences. This is consistent with an analysis of unaccusatives as raising verbs with a trace: the trace corresponds to an extra mental representation of its antecedent. Spanish speakers who scan their conceptual representation to find the target word recognize it more slowly in unaccusative-verb sentences: this may indicate that the conceptual representation of unaccusatives is more complex than that of unergatives. Overall, the results give experimental support to linguistic frameworks that differentiate conceptual from linguistic levels of representation and to syntactic models that postulate NP-trace.