Abstract There exists a clear association between animacy and the grammatical function of transitive subject. The grammar of some languages require the transitive subject to be high in animacy, or at least higher than the object. A similar animacy preference has been observed in processing studies in languages without such a categorical animacy effect. This animacy preference has been mainly established in structures in which either one or both arguments are provided before the verb. Our goal was to establish (i) whether this preference can already be observed before any argument is provided, and (ii) whether this preference is mediated by verbal information. To this end we exploited the V2 property of Dutch which allows the verb to precede its arguments. Using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm we presented participants with V2 structures with either an auxiliary (e.g. Gisteren heeft X … ‘Yesterday, X has …’) or a lexical main verb (e.g. Gisteren motiveerde X … ‘Yesterday, X motivated …’) and we measured looks to the animate referent. The results indicate that the animacy preference can already be observed before arguments are presented and that the selectional restrictions of the verb mediate this bias, but do not override it completely.

中文翻译：

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动画和言语信息如何影响V2句子处理：来自眼动的证据

摘要动画性与及物的语法功能之间存在明显的联系。某些语言的语法要求及物动词具有很高的生气勃勃性，或至少高于其宾语。在用语言进行的处理研究中观察到了类似的动画效果偏好，而没有这种分类动画效果。这种动画性偏好主要是在动词之前提供一个或两个自变量的结构中建立的。我们的目标是确定（i）在提供任何论据之前是否已经可以观察到这种偏好，以及（ii）这种偏好是否由言语信息介导。为此，我们利用了Dutch的V2属性，该属性允许动词放在其参数之前。使用视觉世界的眼动追踪范式，我们向参与者展示了带有辅助语气（例如Gisteren heeft X…'Yesterday，X has…'）或词汇主动词（例如Gisteren motiveerde X…'昨天，X动机...）的V2结构。 '），我们对动画对象进行了外观测量。结果表明，在出现参数之前已经可以观察到动画偏好，并且动词的选择限制可以调节偏见，但不能完全覆盖偏见。