Parsing of Subject-Verb Agreement by German Infants

This study investigates the early parsing of subject–verb agreement in German-acquiring infants, focusing on whether morphosyntactic dependencies are parsed in real time when φ-feature morphology is the only available disambiguating cue. German offers a stringent test case due to the syncretic nature of the third-person pronoun sie (‘she’ / ‘they’) despite the language’s obligatory subject expression. Using a preferential-looking paradigm adapted from Gavarró & Keidel (2024), we tested 19 monolingual German-learning infants (17.5–22 months) on sentences containing either lexically specified Determiner phrases or ambiguous pronominal subjects. Eye-tracking results revealed that infants reliably identified referents based on subject–verb agreement morphology in both full-DP and pronominal conditions, although effects were more robust with overt subjects. These findings challenge claims of a production–comprehension asymmetry and support models that posit early syntactic competence, including the computation of agreement, not contingent on input frequency or semantic salience, but reflecting universal, structure-sensitive operations.