Israel ISF-DFG: Grammar or Working Memory? Incremental Processing of Resumptive Pronouns in Hebrew, Standard German, and Alemannic German

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Titus von der Malsburg
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561339501

Our international research project seeks to disentangle the roles of grammatical rules and working memory in understanding sentences that involve so-called filler-gap constructions (e.g., “I met the doctor that the director said that the interns disappointed ∅.”). Specifically we focus on the processing of resumptive pronouns (RPs). RPs are used in many languages in place of a gap, ostensibly easing the cognitive load on the listener or reader (“… that the director said that the interns disappointed her.”). However, the actual benefit of RPs on sentence comprehension remains a subject of debate among linguists and cognitive psychologists with conflicting results speaking either in favor of an assisting role of RPs (results on Hebrew by PI Meltzer-Asscher) or against it (results on English by PI von der Malsburg). This project proposes a comparative study of RP processing across three languages: Hebrew, where RPs are grammatically permitted; Standard German, which typically does not use RPs; and Alemannic German, a dialect that accepts RP usage under particular circumstances and sometimes nearly requires it. The study's novelty lies primarily in its cross-linguistic approach, which will allow us to assess the influence of grammatical acceptability of RPs on their processing and comprehension. Using eye-tracking, we aim to record real-time data on how subjects from each linguistic background process sentences with and without RPs, with particular attention to the effects of working memory constraints. This method provides us with a direct measure of cognitive effort and will be complemented by comprehension questions to gauge how understanding accuracy is affected by RPs and working memory constraints. Our research targets three hypotheses: First, that RPs are processed similarly to gaps across languages irrespective of grammatical rules; second, that RPs, like other pronouns, may introduce confusion in the presence of potential distractors; and third, that the grammatical status of RPs could influence their susceptibility to this confusion, thus affecting comprehension differently across languages. The latter hypothesis will be directly tested for the first time in this project. By exploring these hypotheses, our project aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how grammatical structures and memory retrieval mechanisms interact during sentence processing. The project will also shed light on more general questions, namely the cross-linguistic applicability of processing mechanisms, the ubiquity of memory retrieval during sentence processing, and the relation between reading times and comprehension.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Partner Organisation: The Israel Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Aya Meltzer-Asscher
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Eleonore Brandner