Processing analytic and synthetic verb constructions in Italian: a self-paced reading study

Synthetic verbs, e.g. the Italian verb passeggiare, ‘to stroll’, or decide, ‘to decide’, express meaning in a single inflected form, while their analytic counterparts, like fare una passeggiata, ‘to take a stroll’, distribute predication across multiple lexical elements, typically a light (support) verb plus a noun phrase, such as in light verb constructions. Although analytic verbs show greater structural complexity when compared to synthetic verbs, it has not yet been definitively established whether they require a higher cognitive processing load. A self-paced reading experiment using the moving-window paradigm was conducted to address this issue. Reading times and comprehension accuracy scores for sentences containing both synthetic and analytic verbs were analyzed. Increased reading time was observed in sentence-final regions for analytic verbs, but not for synthetic verb suggesting a possible delayed integration effect. No differences emerged between the two types of verbs in comprehension. These findings contribute to our understanding of how predicate structure affects real-time sentence reading and comprehension as they partially support the view that structural complexity predicts processing difficulty.