Ambiguity in case marking does not affect the description of transitive events in German: evidence from sentence production and eye-tracking

The current study examined how German speakers described a scene where an agent acts upon a patient when the patient of the event was cued (a red dot preceding the patient, Experiment 1 vs. preview of the patient, Experiment 2). Prior research has shown that effects of attention manipulation on syntactic choice display cross-linguistic variation with notable differences between languages that have morphological case marking on noun phrases and English that lacks such marking. Since in German nominative subject case and accusative object case are unambiguously marked on masculine nouns but not on feminine nouns, it provides the ideal testing ground to investigate how case marking affects sentence production. Our results did not reveal any effect of case marking although the different types of attention manipulation were effective. Moreover, the eye-gaze data revealed that German speakers applied the same sentence-planning strategy for both masculine nouns (unambiguous) and feminine nouns (ambiguous).