The processing of passive sentences in German

Abstract

This study examines the processing and interpretation of passive sentences in German-speaking seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults. This structure is often assumed to be particularly difficult to understand, and not yet fully mastered in primary school (Kemp, Bredel, & Reich, 2008), i.e. in children aged between six and eleven. Few studies provide empirical data concerning this age range; it is therefore unknown whether this assumption is warranted. Against this background, we tested whether the three age groups differed in their off-line comprehension of passive sentences. In addition, we employed Visual World eye-tracking to measure processing difficulties that may differ between age groups and may not be reflected in the final interpretations. Previous studies on adult language processing in German and English have documented a preference to interpret sentences according to an agent-first strategy. Our results show that all three groups make use of this strategy, and that all of them are able to revise this interpretation once the first cue indicating a passive sentence is encountered (the auxiliary verb form wurde).We conclude that at least from age seven on, children have the linguistic and cognitive prerequisites to process the passive morphosyntax of German and to revise initial sentence misinterpretations.

Resolving conflicting cues in processing of ambiguous words: The role of case, word order, and animacy

“…Due to a fully fledged inflectional paradigm, the order of the components in the Russian sentence is positionally unconstrained. Therefore, cases of deviation from the common SVO word order are more frequent than can be expected for other free word order languages (Cristante, 2016; Sekerina, 2003). Therefore, upon encountering a nominal shortly after the stimulus onset, the parser would pre-empt both the subject-first and the object-first structures and, thus, activate both corresponding forms and keep entertaining them up to the resolution point where either can be integrated.…”

“…In locally ambiguous sentence frames (1), there is a strong preference for the SVO structure, where the parser initially interprets the first NP as the sentential subject. When the disambiguating nominative-inflected NP fails to confirm the initial analysis ( der Bussard vs. den Bussard), the parser slows down to recover from the faulty parse, which is reflected in longer reading times (RTs) (Hemforth, 1993; Schlesewsky et al, 2000), delayed visual object detection in a visual world paradigm (Kamide et al, 2006; Knoeferle et al, 2005; Weber et al, 2006), and lower response accuracy, especially with children (Dittmar et al, 2008; Gamper, 2016; Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2014) and younger L2 learners (Binanzer et al, 2018; Cristante, 2016).…”

Explainability of neural networks for child language: Agent‐First strategy in comprehension of Korean active transitive construction

“…Because the activation of the Agent‐First strategy is tied to other grammatical cues such as case‐marking (as a local cue; particularly the nominative case marker) and a second nominal (as a distributional cue), Korean‐speaking children (and even adults) employ this strategy with confidence only when they are provided with a linguistically informative environment. This argument challenges the long‐standing idea that children have the default mapping of the agent onto the first noun as an intrinsic bias for comprehension, as claimed by previous studies targeting the major languages being investigated (Abbot‐Smith et al., 2017; Cristante & Schimke, 2020; Gertner et al., 2006).…”

“…Because of its motivation from multiple sources, this strategy is often deemed as the interface of linguistic knowledge and domain‐general factors in the human mind (Bever, 1970; Bornkessel‐Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2009; Esaulova et al., 2021; Ferreira, 2003; Givón, 1995; Kemmerer, 2012). Indeed, this strategy has drawn attention to researchers working on child language; existing literature, mostly based on a limited range of languages, reports children's heavy reliance on this strategy for sentence comprehension (Abbot‐Smith et al., 2017; Cristante & Schimke, 2020; Gertner et al., 2006; Jackendoff & Wittenberg, 2014; Sinclair & Bronckart, 1972; Slobin & Bever, 1982; Yuan et al., 2012). This favours the early emergence and universal application of this strategy as an intrinsic cognitive bias for child comprehension across languages (but see Garcia & Kidd, 2020; Shin, 2021).…”

Processing to learn noncanonical word orders: Exploring linguistic and cognitive predictors of reanalysis in early L2 sentence comprehension

“…First, the two tasks used for assessing inhibitory control, the Stroop and the Flanker task, may not sufficiently tap those inhibitory control processes that are required for reanalysis of noncanonical constructions (but see Woodard et al, 2016;Ye & Zhou, 2009; see also Poarch & Van Hell, 2019, for a discussion of convergent validity between EF tasks). Second, our participants acquired an L2 and were cognitively much more mature than child L1 learners with lower cognitive control skills (Kidd et al, 2011) or child L2 learners below their teens (Cristante, 2016). It may be that adolescent learners already possess too advanced control skills across the board such that individual differences in cognitive control ability no longer surface in language comprehension.…”