WORD ORDER PROCESSING IN GERMAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

In an experiment on processing effort in sentence comprehension, preference hypotheses on word order and relative clause position were tested in German as a second or foreign language. The experiment involved 62 Slovenian students of German studies in Maribor as participants. The linguistic material consisted of 16 utterances, each with a main clause and a relative clause and each of them a subject-initial or object-initial. The relative clause could occur either after the first or second noun phrase. The procedure used was the self-paced reading paradigm. After each test unit, the participants were asked a comprehension question, either about the subject of the main clause or about the subject of the relative clause. The experiment confirmed the hypotheses that response accuracy to a comprehension question was higher when a clause was subject-initial and when the relative clause occurred after the first noun phrase of the main clause. The experiment did not confirm the assumed interaction between word order and position of the relative clause.