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This paper defends the need to establish diachronic markings in the different lexicographic repertoires that overcome excessively simplifying approaches. Similarly, it advocates a more precise treatment of lexical obsolescence, which rigorously considers the age variable and establishes boundaries between the active and passive vocabulary, because the absence of a mark would imply, in principle, validity of the cataloged lemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with a customary topic on Spanish compound studies: the structures of pez globo and niño prodigio, and their classification as compounds or appositions. I propose that both structures are appositions (created in the syntax), even if they are provided with distinctive properties. I develop a suitable framework for characterizing the existing differences between both classes. In my proposal, globo establishes with pez a different syntactic relationship (one of direct modification) from the one that prodigio establishes with niño (a predication relationship). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an experimental study whose purpose is to determine whether normal cognitive aging affects older adult's processing of ambiguous garden path sentences. The hypothesis that is tested empirically postulates that the reduction in the capacity of working memory due to normal cognitive aging produces a decline in the ambiguous garden path syntactic structure processing, which would eventually affect sentence comprehension. The experiment compares the performance of 39 young adults and 31 older adults in a timed reading comprehension task of sentences that contain direct object /subject temporary syntactic ambiguity (Mientras la joven montaba el potro fue robado de las caballerizas, While the girl was riding the horse was stolen from the stables). Each sentence was followed by a comprehension task. The analysis of the differences in reading times and sentence comprehension partially confirms the hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prosodic and syntactic structures correspond to different levels of analysis of language; however, there is a relation between them that constitutes a powerful tool when facing syntactically ambiguous sentences (Price et al. 1991:1). Robust evidence has been found in Spanish of the preference for high attachment of the relative clause in syntactically ambiguous sentences. Most of the research concerning the topic has focused on finding out how people disambiguate these sentences when reading in silence with on-line or off-line tasks and how the working memory operates in doing so. Few researchers have incorporated the study of the underlying melody patterns in this type of sentence. The present research describes the underlying prosodic pattern of ambiguous sentences with high attachment of relative clause produced by native speakers of Spanish from Concepcion. The recorded utterances were labeled using the ToBI system and submitted to perceptual judgment to confirm the prosodic pattern of preference for high-attachment of the relative clause as the phonetic-phonologic support that aids listeners to disambiguate this type of sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]