Literacy overrides effects of animacy: A picture-naming study with pre-literate German children and adult speakers of German and Arabic.

Animacy plays a key role for human cognition, which is also reflected in the way humans process language. However, while experiments on sentence processing show reliable effects of animacy on word order and grammatical function assignment, effects of animacy on conjoined noun phrases (e.g., fish and shoe vs. shoe and fish) have yielded inconsistent results. In the present study, we tested the possibility that effects of animacy are outranked by reading and writing habits. We examined adult speakers of German (left-to-right script) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left script), as well as German preschool children who do not yet know how to read and write. Participants were tested in a picture naming task that presented an animate and an inanimate entity next to one another. On half of the trials, the animate entity was located on the left and, on the other half, it was located on the right side of the screen. We found that adult German and Arabic speakers differed in their order of naming. Whereas German speakers were much more likely to mention the animate entity first when it was presented on the left than on the right, a reverse tendency was observed for speakers of Arabic. Thus, in literate adults, the ordering of conjoined noun phrases was influenced by reading and writing habits rather than by the animacy status of an entity. By contrast, pre-literate children preferred to start their utterances with the animate entity regardless of position, suggesting that effects of animacy in adults have been overwritten by effects of literacy.

What eye and hand movements tell us about expectations towards argument order: An eye- and mouse-tracking study in German.

Previous research on real-time sentence processing in German has shown that listeners use the morphological marking of accusative case on a sentence-initial noun phrase to not only interpret the current argument as the object and patient, but also to predict a plausible agent. So far, less is known about the use of case marking to predict the semantic role of upcoming arguments after the subject/agent has been encountered. In the present study, we examined the use of case marking for argument interpretation in transitive as well as ditransitive structures. We aimed to control for multiple factors that could have influenced processing in previous studies, including the animacy of arguments, world knowledge, and the perceptibility of the case cue. Our results from eye- and mouse-tracking indicate that the exploitation of the first case cue that enables the interpretation of the unfolding sentence is influenced by (i) the strength of argument order expectation and (ii) the perceptual salience of the case cue. PsycINFO code: 2720 Linguistics & Language & Speech.