Small is beautiful: The processing of the left periphery in German

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the interplay of structure building and the integration of morphosyntactic information during incremental parsing. The critical sentence conditions examined the processing of verbs that were ambiguous between a clause-initial finite main verb analysis and an analysis as an (homophonous) infinitival verb in a fronted verb phrase. The task interacts with particle stripping, since particles are stranded if the finite verb is fronted. Conversely, if the particle is present, the potentially finite verb cannot be the fronted finite verb. This is a top-down (grammar-driven) prediction of the parser with immediate impact on the ongoing structure building process of the parser. The ERP results provide first of all straightforward indications for a minimality-driven parsing process (motto: assign immediately the minimal convergent structure to the available input string, and disregard ambiguities that would result in more complex assignments). Second, they show that the parser cross-checks (validates) the minimality-driven outcome for its compatibility with the locally available morpho-syntactic information (finiteness, agreement, particle stripping). Furthermore, we suggest a simple metric which resolves apparent contradictions with respect to previous ERP findings for reanalysis in structural ambiguities and which solely depends on the complexity of structural reanalyzes (that is, whether the required structural modification proceeds within a single clause, or takes place across a sentence boundary).