EMPTY CATEGORIES ACCESS THEIR ANTECEDENTS DURING COMPREHENSION - UNACCUSATIVES IN SPANISH

Spanish speakers who scan their syntactic representation to find a wor d from the subject NP in a just-comprehended sentence recognize the wo rd faster in unaccusative-verb sentences than in unergative-verb sente nces. This is consistent with an analysis of unaccusatives as raising verbs with a trace: the trace corresponds to an extra mental represent ation of its antecedent, Spanish speakers who scan their conceptual re presentation to find the target word recognize it more slowly in unacc usative-verb sentences: this may indicate that the conceptual represen tation of unaccusatives is more complex than that of unergatives. Over all, the results give experimental support to linguistic frameworks th at differentiate conceptual from linguistic levels of representation a nd to syntactic models that postulate NP-trace.