Gender dissimilarity between subject and object facilitates online-comprehension of agent–patient–relations in German: an eye-tracking study with 6- to 10-year-old monolingual children

• Annika Bürsgens ^[1] ; Jürgen Cholewa ^[2] ; Axel Mayer ^[1] ; Thomas Günther ^[1]
  1. [1] Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University

     Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen University

     Städteregion Aachen, Alemania

     
  2. [2] Heidelberg University of Education

     Heidelberg University of Education

     Stadtkreis Heidelberg, Alemania

     
• Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 259, 2021
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • In this eye-tracking study, we examined whether gender dissimilarity between the case-marked subject and object noun phrases in a subject-verb-object (SVO) or object-verb-subject sentence (OVS) was used to predict thematic roles (agent and patient) and facilitate the grammatical analyses needed for thematic role assignment. Forty-two German-speaking 6- to 10-year-old children looked at two drawings depicting an action between two figures while listening to a sentence. One drawing matched the sentence, but the other showed the figures’ thematic roles reversed. For half of the sentences, each figure's thematic role could be predicted shortly after stimulus onset from the gender of the first word (an article) due to gender dissimilarity between the subject and the object. For the other sentences, children had to wait at least until they heard the first noun of the sentence. Our results confirmed that the children shifted their looks earlier and more confidently to the target in SVO sentences with gender-dissimilar noun phrases. Results for OVS sentences were not so clear-cut: a sentence-final facilitation effect of gender dissimilarity was only visible subsequently when agent and patient were analyzed separately. Our findings are discussed with respect to different approaches to the role of gender processing in sentence comprehension.