Comprehension Of Relative Clauses In Spanish: Syntactic Intervention On Headed And False Free Relatives

In this study, an auditory comprehension task of headed and false free relative clauses (RC) in Argentinean Spanish is presented. The results show that in both cases object RCs were more difficult to comprehend than subject ORs. This fact is consistent with the proposal of syntactic intervention by inclusion of morphosyntactic features (Rizzi, 2004). Both, headed and semi-free object RCs, are lexically restricted by a lexical element with the feature [+N] and this element interferes in the establishment of the syntactic dependency.