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Abstract:
German, in contrast to English, has a relatively
free word order. For instance, the first determiner phrase
(DP) after the complementizer can be either the subject or the
object of the complement clause as a result of case ambiguity
(nominative vs. accusative). Sentences can be constructed
which are ambiguous until the number information of the finite
verb appears:
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(1)
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a.
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Maria hat gesagt,
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daß
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[die Mutter(nom)
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die Kinder(acc)
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beschaeftigt hat]F
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Mary has said,
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that
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the mother
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the children
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occupied has
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"Mary said that the mother
occupied the children."
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(1)
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b.
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Maria hat
gesagt,
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daß
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die Mutter(i,acc)
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[die KINDER(nom) ]F [ti]
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beschaeftigt haben.
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Mary has said,
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that
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the mother
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the children
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occupied have
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"Mary said that the children
occupied the mother."
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(2)
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a.
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Maria hat
gesagt,
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daß
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[sie(nom)
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die Kinder(acc)
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beschaeftigt hat]F
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Mary has
said,
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that
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she
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the children
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occupied has
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"Mary said that she occupied the
children."
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b.
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Maria hat gesagt,
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daß
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[sie(i,acc)
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die Kinder (nom) [ti]
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beschaeftigt haben]F
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Mary has said, that
she
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the children
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occupied have
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"Mary said that the children
occupied her."
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The object-first order in (1b) and (2b) results
not only in a more complex syntactic structure, but in (1b) also
in a change of focus structure accompanied by a prosodic
change. Results of reading experiments, investigating these
ambiguities, showed clear garden path effects for sentences like
(1b) (Bader & Meng, 1999). These effects were clearly
smaller in sentences with a pronominal object like (2b).
It is assumed that a prosodic contour is projected
during silent reading which may influence or interact with
syntactic processing (Implicit Prosody Hypothesis, Fodor
2001). Thus, one reason for the processing difference in
scrambled sentences with pronouns in contrast to referential DPs
could be, apart from the necessary syntactic reanalysis in both
sentence types, the additional revision of the prosodic
structure.
To investigate this hypothesis, we carried out two
reading experiments using event-related brain potentials (ERP) to
differentiate between processes of syntactic reanalysis on the
one hand and the revision of the prosodic structure on the other
hand. The data analysis showed two different components in
Experiment 1: An early positivity (300-400 ms) which is
interpreted as reanalysis of the syntactic structure, and a right
anterior negativity (400-600 ms) which might be seen as the
correlate of a prosodic revision process.
In Experiment 2, we eliminated the difference in
the prosodic structure between the two sentence types by
insertion of a focus particle in front of the second DP, thus
preventing the parser from a prosodic structure revision.
If the right anterior negativity in Experiment 1 is correctly
correlated with the revision of the prosodic structure, it should
disappear in Experiment 2. As predicted, there was no right
anterior negativity, whereas the early positivity (300-400 ms)
was still elicited and followed by a later positive component
(500-900 ms). We are currently running a third experiment
to clarify the appearance of this late syntactic process in the
second experiment. Taken together, our results show that
prosodic and syntactic processes can be differentiated in the
ERP. Furthermore, the results support the assumption that
implicit prosody plays a crucial role during silent
reading.
References
Bader, M., & Meng, M. (1999).
Subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses: An
across-the-board comparison. Journal of Psycholinguistic
Research, 28 (2), 121-143.
Fodor, J. D. (2001). Prosodic disambiguation
in silent reading. Paper presented at the conference
'Prosody in Processing', Utrecht.
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