Case and Linking in Language Comprehension: Evidence from German

The German language, due to its verb-final nature, relatively free order of constituents and morphological Case system, poses challenges for models of human syntactic processing which have mainly been developed on the basis of head-initial languages with little or no morphological Case.

The verb-final order means that the parser has to make predictions about the input before receiving the verb. What are these predictions? What happens when the predictions turn out to be wrong? Furthermore,...