languages such as German ? the strategies employed in real-time comprehension may differ significantly from those observable for English (e.g. Schlesewsky & Bornkessel, in press). For example, whereas argument interpretation in English relies heavily on positional information, German makes use of both a positional and a morphological strategy. Which of the two is chosen in a given sentence crucially depends on the morphological informativeness (i.e. degree of ambiguity) of the arguments. Importantly, the two strategies are not equivalent with regard to interpretative efficiency such that only the morphological strategy leads to a maximisation of on-line interpretation.

On the basis of these observations from German, we have developed a model of argument comprehension (the “Argument Dependency Model”, ADM) that makes explicit the assumption of two alternative processing pathways (positional and morphological) for initial argument interpretation (Bornkessel, 2002; Schlesewsky & Bornkessel, in press). Crucially, Despite the undisputed diversity of human languages, most major models of language comprehension continue to base their fundamental processing assumptions on data from English. However, recent neurophysiological findings indicate that ? even in closely related the model assumes that other factors such as plausibility or discourse context do not play a role in this initial phase of interpretation, even in languages where morphological and positional factors appear to underdetermine argument interpretation from a surface (timeinsensitive) perspective. Rather, the initial establishment of an argument hierarchy takes place on the basis of a language-specific, relative weighting of the two processing pathways.

In this paper, I will present neurophysiological data from several further languages (Russian, Finnish) that support the basic architecture of the ADM. In addition, the findings from these languages point towards further important extensions to the model, for example with regard to the role of verb-object positioning. Finally, I will discuss neuroimaging findings from German and English to address the question of whether the positional and morphological pathways may be associated with distinct neural substrates.

References

Bornkessel, I. (2002). The Argument Dependency Model: A Neurocognitive Approach to Incremental Interpretation. Leipzig: MPI Series in Cognitive Neuroscience, 28.
Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel, I. (in press). On incremental interpretation: Degrees of meaning accessed during sentence comprehension. Lingua.