Processing German past tenses

The impact of sentence onset and dialect

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of the Uniform Information Density principle on the use and processing of German past tenses, focusing on the perfect and the preterit. It examines whether sentence-initial temporal versus tense-neutral adverbs affect acceptability and processing speed, and how regional variation – particularly the decline of the preterit in some dialects – modulates this effect. The findings from an acceptability judgement study and a self-paced reading study indicate that temporal adverbs ease the processing of preterit constructions, especially in dialect regions where the preterit is less common. It thus provides evidence for the influence of dialects on the processing of Standard German and supports the Uniform Information Density-based notion of optimal information distribution.