Attraction Phenomena in German

In this paper we investigate how case features are represented and processed during language comprehension. To this end, we explored the phenomena of case attraction in German in a series of four experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgment procedure. Case attraction leads to errors that are akin to subject-verb agreement errors intensively studied in English and other languages (e.g. Bock & Miller, 1991): Under certain circumstances, the case feature of a nominal phrase is erroneously replaced by the case feature of an adjacent relative pronoun with the result that the clause as a whole is perceived to contain a case error. In our experiments, we varied whether the head noun was morphologically case ambiguous or not and whether the case on the relative pronoun was a marked case or an unmarked one. The results revealed the following: (1) Case attraction errors occur independent of whether the head noun is morphologically compatible with the case supplied by the relative pronoun or not. (2) Marked case features can overwrite unmarked case features but not the other way round, where markedness is defined with respect to the syntactic case patterns found in the language. These results, which are similar to what has been found for subject-verb agreement errors, suggest that the syntactic representations computed by the human sentence processing mechanism reflect the syntactic markedness distinctions within the case system but does not encode information about morphological ambiguity.