The Impact of Case and Prosody on the Availability of Argument Structures

Abstract

German sentences with the subcategorizing verb in the final position are locally underspecified with respect to argument structure. The aim of the study reported here was to ascertain the influence of argument-specific and prosodic information on the availability of alternative argument structures. To achieve this goal, the processing of single vs. double object structures was investigated in two experiments. Materials consisted of sentence fragments beginning with a subject followed by an auxiliary and an object that was either marked for the dative or accusative case. Moreover, sentence fragments differed by means of prosody, being either cut out of a single or double object sentence. In Experiment 1, these sentence fragments were presented for completion by a second object and a ditransitive verb (cross-modal completion), whereas in Experiment 2, subjects had to name a case-congruent monotransitive verb after the offset of the fragment (cross-modal naming). Error rates (Experiment 1) and articulation latencies (Experiment 2) revealed an effect of case but no effect of prosody. We conclude that case has a strong impact on argument structure availability and that prosodic differences may be too subtle to influence performance in these tasks. Consequences for models of incremental sentence comprehension are discussed.