Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.