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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1433482

The Role of Alternatives in the Cognitive Processing of German Demonstratives: Insights from Online and Offline Processing

Provisionally accepted
Derya COKAL Derya COKAL *Klaus von Heusinger Klaus von Heusinger
  • University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study, employing eye-tracking reading and sentence completion experiments, explores the impact of competing antecedents on the German demonstratives der and dieser. It challenges prior assumptions, revealing that in competitive alternative antecedent contexts, processing dieser initially posed challenges, indicating sensitivity to alternatives. Dieser exhibited less processing difficulties than der, potentially influenced by a register effect. Consistent with previous findings, in the offline task, references to the non-prominent entity were similar for both demonstratives, but our online experiment shows functional differences in cognitive processes between the two in reading. Our results suggest that Thematic Role accounts better explain antecedent preferences for der and dieser than Centering Theory.

    Keywords: Demonstratives, anaphora, online-processing, competing antecedents, discourse processing

    Received: 15 May 2024; Accepted: 25 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 COKAL and von Heusinger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Derya COKAL, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

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