Verb Processing In German And English: Ambiguity, Discontinuous Forms, And Thematic Complexity
Dieter G Hillert · 1998
This chapter explores a "universal feature" of human sentence processing by considering the crosslinguistic comparison of on-line verb processing in German and English sentence comprehension. A "context-free" paradigm is applied to generate data not confounded with inter- and intrasubjective variability. According to findings with noun-noun ambiguities, it is to expect that verb ambiguities are exhaustively accessed in canonical structures. Data from two experiments that investigated how discontinuous German verbs are accessed during on-line sentence comprehension is presented. A parser might automatically inhibit meanings excluded by the structural case marker. This leads to the interesting hypothesis that the multiple lexical access mechanism occurs if the inherent properties of a lexical item must be accessed, whereas lexical access is morphosyntactically constrained if structural case determines the type of verb meaning being accessed downstream.