title: The advantage of first mention in Spanish.
abstract: An advantage of first mention-that is, faster access to participants mentioned first in a sentence-has previously been demonstrated only in English. We report three experiments demonstrating that the advantage of first mention occurs also in Spanish sentences, regardless of whether the first-mentioned participants are syntactic subjects, and regardless, too, of whether they are proper names or inanimate objects. Because greater word-order flexibility is allowed in Spanish than in English (e.g., nonpassive object-verb-subject constructions exist in Spanish), these findings provide additional evidence that the advantage of first mention is a general cognitive phenomenon.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de PsicologÍa Cognitiva, Universidad de La Laguna, 38200, Tenerife, Spain, mcarreiras@ull.es.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
authors.forename: M A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Gernsbacher
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Villa