In two visual word eye tracking studies, we investigated theinfluence of prosody and case marking on children’s andadults’ thematic role assignment. We assigned an SVO/OVS-biasing (vs. neutral) prosodic contour tounambiguously case marked German subject-verb-object(SVO) and object-verb-subject (OVS) sentencesrespectively. Scenes depicted ambiguous action events(e.g., donkey-paints->elephant-paints->cheetah) but casemarking and prosody could, in principle, disambiguate. Inadults, case marking but not prosody rapidly guidedthematic role assignment. Children did not rely on casemarking but exploited the biasing prosody to enhance theiragent-first interpretation of the sentences. These resultssuggest that in scenes depicting fully ambiguous rolerelations, children’s understanding of case marking at theage of five is not yet robust enough to enable thematic roleassignment. Prosody did not overwrite the SVO preference,it rather enhanced it.

German 5-year-olds are able to rapidly recruit depicted ac-tions to assign thematic roles in unambiguous sentences whenthese actions can be inspected throughout sentence presenta-tion (Münster, 2016; Zhang & Knoeferle, 2012). In two visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated whether these find-ings extend to locally structurally ambiguous utterances andto short-lived action presentation. In addition, we comparedthe action depiction to a character’s wiggling motion. The ac-tion and the wiggle served as cues to the agent (subject) indifficult-to-understand OVS sentences. Participants listenedto structurally ambiguous object-verb-subject (OVS) sentencesabout, for instance, a bug being pushed by a bull while in-specting a bull, a bug, and a worm. We manipulated the sceneat verb-onset such that either a) no action no wiggle, b) noaction one wiggle, c) one action no wiggle, or d) one actionone wiggle appeared. Both of these animations caused theadults and the children to visually anticipate the agent rolefiller (corresponding to the subject in the OVS sentence) be-fore its mention. However, in answering post-trial who-does-what-to-whom comprehension questions, the children did not(unlike suggested by previous findings) benefit from the actiondepictions. Together the eye-gaze and post-trial comprehen-sion results suggest that the nature of cue presentation (e.g.,the abrupt onset of an action or a wiggle and limitations on cuepresence) plays an important role in both the immediate visualattention and somewhat later interpretation effects of such vi-sual cues during children’s language comprehension.