Planning of active and passive voice in German

Abstract

This eye-tracking experiment investigated how morphological case affects German speakers’ descriptions of transitive events, specifically whether explicit case marking modulates speakers’ structural choices. To increase the production of non-canonical structures (passive, patient-initial active), we primed patients in event scenes with a red dot. Subject and object case in German are unambiguously marked on masculine nouns but not on feminine nouns. If explicit case marking requires more structural planning, we should find an effect of gender. For feminine nouns, speakers may start with the cued patient and continue with a passive or a patient-initial active sentence. However, analyses of syntactic choice, speech onset times and eye gaze revealed that gender and thus case marking had no effect on sentence planning