Copyright by Joshua Frank 2020 The Dissertation Committee for Joshua Frank Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: An Experimental Approach to Recomplementation: Evidence from Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish Committee: Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, Supervisor Alejandro Cuza Barbara Bullock Sandro Sessarego An Experimental Approach to Recomplementation: Evidence from Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish by Joshua Frank Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2020 Dedication A mis padres, Vivian and Dan, who in different ways have always inspired me. Acknowledgements During the course of this dissertation project, I have been fortunate to count on the support of many. Thank you to my mentors Almeida Jacqueline Toribio and Alejandro Cuza for their unconditional support and belief in me, as well as their steadfast direction throughout the course of this project. I am grateful to my two additional committee members, Barbara Bullock and Sandro Sessarego, as well as several colleagues past and present—Fernando Llanos, Adrian Riccelli, Crystal Marull, Jesse Abing and David Giancaspro—who all provided valuable feedback and assistance. I am also deeply appreciative of Belem López and Llama lab for affording me new collaborative research opportunities and lab management experience during my final year as a graduate student. Throughout the duration of my PhD program, I spent time not only in the “live music capital of the world” but also New Brunswick, NJ, during a fellowship year at Rutgers, as well as NYC, where I helped to develop an online language learning program at Lingo Live. I’m particularly grateful to my Noise Revival Orchestra bandmates, my classmates at both UT Austin and Rutgers, as well as my former work family at Lingo Live. The camaraderie leaves a fond and indelible mark on this chapter of my life. Thank you to my parents, to whom this dissertation project is dedicated, and my siblings—Aron, Joey and Miriam— who bring me so much joy. Lastly, I’m grateful to Jessie and Teddy for their patience and trust as I converted our only bedroom into an office and a classroom. Thank you for insisting on a daily routine, including regular exercise. This was a different time and I’m grateful to have experienced it with the two of you. v Abstract An Experimental Approach to Recomplementation: Evidence from Monolingual and Bilingual Spanish Joshua Frank, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Almeida Jacqueline Toribio This dissertation advances the study of recomplementation in Spanish (e.g., Villa- García, 2015), with three experimental studies that probe the representation and processing of the left periphery while addressing shortcomings in the field of syntax more generally. Recomplementation is the phenomenon whereby one or more left-dislocated phrases or circumstantial adjuncts intervene between a primary (C1) and secondary (C2) complementizer, e.g., He said that1 later in the afternoon that2 he would clean his room. Study 1 investigates the grammatical status of recomplementation in US heritage speakers of Spanish via acceptability judgment and preference tasks. Results demonstrate that heritage speakers prefer the overt C2 variety at a higher rate than the baseline group. These findings are interpreted within the Model of Divergent Attainment (Polinsky & Scontras, 2020), where complexities associated with “silent” phenomena and dependency distance, along with processing burden, lead to reanalysis and eventual divergent attainment. Study 2 explores recomplementation as a locus of dialectal variation in Colombian and Cuban Spanish via elicited imitation and sentence completion tasks. Results provide evidence that overt C2 is neither licensed by the grammar nor a facilitator of complement integration. vi Importantly, the possibility of task effect cannot be ruled out. Lastly, study 3 analyzes the incremental processing of recomplementation via self-paced reading. Results demonstrate that a psycholinguistic model informed by syntactic theory is favorable to one that is not. This conclusion is further supported by an analysis of individual differences in working memory span. While advancing recomplementation research, this dissertation offers experimental evidence in support of three broader claims. First, speakers with diverse profiles (e.g., heritage speakers) inform general theory and contribute to such disparate topics as processing complexity, the role of input and experience in language development and variation among the Spanishes of the world. Second, researcher selection bias and the effects of task must not be overlooked in the literature, as they threaten the ultimate pursuit of knowledge. Finally, when experimental findings, psycholinguistic models and syntactic- theoretical accounts inform one another, the outcome is superior. vii Table of Contents List of Tables ................................................................................................................ xii List of Figures .............................................................................................................. xiv Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background....................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Recomplementation .......................................................................................... 5 1.3 Specific Findings and Broader Contributions .................................................... 7 1.4 Organization of the Dissertation ...................................................................... 10 Chapter 2: US Heritage Spanish Study .......................................................................... 12 2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 12 2.2 Linguistic Phenomenon ................................................................................... 14 2.2.1 Recomplementation Theory .............................................................. 14 2.2.2 Experimental Evidence ..................................................................... 16 2.3 Sources of Divergent Attainment .................................................................... 20 2.3.1 Vulnerable Phenomena ..................................................................... 20 2.3.2 Model of Divergent Attainment ........................................................ 22 2.3.3 Research Questions .......................................................................... 26 2.4 The Study ....................................................................................................... 28 2.4.1 Participants ....................................................................................... 28 2.4.2 Methods and Design ......................................................................... 31 2.4.3 Results.............................................................................................. 35 2.5 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 42 viii Chapter 3: Cuban and Colombian Spanish Study .......................................................... 49 3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 49 3.2 Linguistic Phenomenon ................................................................................... 52 3.2.1 Syntactic-Theoretical Review ........................................................... 52 3.2.2 The Function of Secondary Que........................................................ 57 3.2.3 The Disparity between Theoretical Accounts and Experimental Findings .............................................................................................. 58 3.3 Morphosyntactic Variation in Spanish ............................................................. 60 3.3.1 Cuban and “Mainland” Spanish ........................................................ 60 3.3.2 Frank and Toribio (2017) .................................................................. 64 3.3.3 Research Questions .......................................................................... 66 3.4 The Study ....................................................................................................... 69 3.4.1 Participants ....................................................................................... 69 3.4.2 Methods and Design ......................................................................... 71 3.4.3 Results.............................................................................................. 75 3.5 Discussion ...................................................................................................... 84 Chapter 4: Incremental Sentence Processing Study ....................................................... 89 4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 89 4.2 Syntactic Parsing............................................................................................. 92 4.2.1 Expectation-Based and Memory-Based Accounts ............................. 92 4.2.2 Committing to a Prediction ..............................................................