Relativized Minimality: Von der Theorie zur Empirie. Der Einfluss grammatischer Merkmale auf das online und offline Verständnis von Relativsätzen bei Erwachsenen und Kindern im Deutschen

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Flavia Adani
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2012 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 220316658

This proposal focuses on recent extensions of Relativized Minimality (RM) to psycho- and neurolinguistics by testing German relative clauses (RC) in language processing (healthy adults), acquisition (typically-developing children) and breakdown (adults with aphasia and children with Specific Language Impair-ment). This is the first study testing the extended RM approach in German, a language that allows to de-sign strict minimal pairs of subject/object-extracted relatives and to investigate the impact of grammatical features (e.g. case and number) on RC comprehension. In addition to auditory off-line comprehension, on-line processing of RC will be investigated by monitoring eye movement during a referent-identification task (visual world paradigm). This method provides a window into unfolding unimpaired and impaired sen-tence comprehension. Therefore, it allows us to investigate at which stages different grammatical features become relevant for RC processing and to what extent RM can capture the impact of these features on RC comprehension. Hence, the results will contribute to the theoretical characterization of RC compre-hension and its breakdown in language impairments (aphasia and SLI). Thus, various psycho- and neu-rolinguistic phenomena in RC comprehension can be embedded into a single, comprehensive and over-arching theoretical account.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Persons: Privatdozent Dr. Frank Burchert; Dr. Nicole H. Stadie