Embedded NP error in German object relative clause comprehension: A case for a universal developmental pathway.

We report the results of an eye-tracking study investigating German children's comprehension of subject relative clauses (SRC) and object relative clauses (ORC) with morphologically unambiguous head and embedded noun phrases (NPs). The experimental paradigm was adopted from Adani and Fritzsche. Children's eye movements were tracked on the visual display while they were listening to an SRC or an ORC. Subsequently, they had to choose the most appropriate visual character on the screen to go with a particular relative clause type in a character selection paradigm. All the head NP and the embedded NPs were of masculine gender. Thus, the relative clause syntax was disambiguated by the ending on the relative pronoun and, subsequently, on the determiner in the embedded NP. We computed fixation probabilities towards the syntactic competitor and the embedded NP character in addition to the proportions of looks towards the target character on the screen. Thematic reversal error remained the dominant error type on children's response accuracy data. The subject advantage was also confirmed on the eye-tracking data, though it was overridden in the post-relative clause time window. However, there was a significant increase in fixation probabilities towards the embedded NP character in the ORC, but not in the SRC condition. While children were less efficient to use the morphological information on the relative pronoun to generate an expectation of a non-canonical ORC structure, they obviously used embedded NP morphology later in the sentence to update their ongoing structural analysis.

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

We report results from a self-paced silent-reading study and a self-paced reading-aloud study examining ambiguous forms (heteronyms) of Russian animate and inanimate nouns which are differentiated in speech through word stress, for example, uCHItelja.TEACHER.GEN/ACC.SG and uchiteLJA.TEACHERS.NOM.PL.1 During reading, the absence of the auditory cue (word stress) to word identification results in morphologically ambiguous forms since both words have the same inflectional marking, -ja. Because word inflection is a reliable cue to syntactic role assignment, the ambiguity affects the level of morphology and of syntactic structure. However, word order constraints and frequency advantage of the GEN over both the NOM and the ACC noun forms with the -a/-ja inflection should pre-empt two different syntactic parses (OVS vs. SVO) when the heteronym is sentence-initial. We inquired into whether the parser is aware of the multi-level ambiguity and whether selected conflicting cues (case, word order, animacy) can prime parallel access to several structural parses. We found that animate and inanimate nouns patterned differently. The difference was consistent across the experiments. Against the backdrop of classical sentence processing dichotomies, the emergent pattern fits with the serial interactive or the parallel modular parser hypothesis.