Task sensitivity of animacy effects: evidence from German picture descriptions

In this article we (re) consider how animacy, a conceptual property of referents, affects word order. It is commonly assumed that animacy effects arise during conceptualization, taken broadly to include processing at a mental model level. The order in which referents are conceptualized can directly affect word order. That is, animates tend to surface in the initial position in sentences, regardless whether or not it is a subject position. There is, however, some indication that animacy and thematic role interact under certain task conditions (e.g. Ferreira 1994). We suggest that such interactions occur when speakers change the time course of referent processing to reduce the processing workload during the upcoming utterance. When they compact preutterance planning sufficiently, for example, by overlapping processing of referents, they can cram in more processing with minimal lengthening of planning time. But this overlap facilitates an interaction of referent information that does not occur with more sequential planning. We present data from three German picture description experiments that, taken together, support this account.