First-mention and Grammatical Role are well-established in the literature
as cues used by adults and children to resolve ambiguous pronouns across a
variety of languages [1]. Recently, Schumacher et al. [2] reported that
thematic role is the driving cue in adult German pronoun resolution, with
*er* being linked to agent antecedents and *der* to patient antecedents. We
report two visual world eye-tracking experiments that were designed to
dissociate the influence of order of mention (1st vs 2nd), grammatical role
(subject vs object), and thematic roles (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on
7- to 10-year-olds’ interpretation of German pronouns.
Children listened to an *SVO* or *OVS *ordered introduction sentence that
described two characters (e.g., *doctor, magician*), which was followed by
a sentence that contained either *er* or *der*. This 2x2 design was applied
to introduction sentences with active accusative verbs in Exp. 1 (N=72),
and dative-experiencer verbs in Exp. 2 (N=64).
Our results indicate that children appear to have developed robust
preferences to attach *der* to entities that carry low prominence features
(2nd, object, patient), and show a trend to attach *er *to entities that
carry high prominence features (1st, subject, agent). Like adults, children
are using a combination of factors to resolve German pronouns, and have clearer preferences when the prominence of these features is aligned.