Table 1 Sentence material. Four experimental sentences were constructed per item.

From: Communicative predictions can overrule linguistic priors

Structure

Version 1

Version 2

SOV

Heute hat der Mann den Freund gesehen.

Heute hat der Freund den Mann gesehen.

Today has the [nom.] man the [acc.] friend seen.

Today has the [nom.] friend the [acc.] man seen.

OSV

Heute hat den Freund der Mann gesehen.

Heute hat den Mann der Freund gesehen.

Today has the [acc.] friend the [nom.] man seen.

Today has the [acc.] man the [nom.] friend seen.

Probe

Heute hat XXX Mann XXX Freund gesehen.

Heute hat XXX Freund XXX Mann gesehen.

Today has XXX man XXX friend seen.

Today has XXX friend XXX man seen.

  1. These sentences differed in their syntactic structure (SOV vs. OSV) and in whether a noun was the subject or the object of the sentence. The syntactic structure of a sentence became clear at the determiner of the first noun phrase (i.e. der or den). For the probe trials the determiners were replaced with white noise (XXX indicating the noise). For every item the same nouns were implemented both as subject and object of the sentence (Version 1 and 2).
Back to article page