• animacy
• German
• language acquisition
• number
• sentence comprehension

How do children come to master sentences? The key to sentence comprehension is the so-called thematic role assignment, a process that allows us to figure out the “who does what to whom” hiding behind every utterance. Typologically different languages encode this kind of information in various ways. One of the most visible features in sentence interpretation is word order. Word order though, can sometimes be misleading. What happens for example in those languages that allow various alternative word orders? German for instance is one of those. Besides canonical SVO-structures, it also allows non-canonical OVS-structures, which make word order a rather unreliable cue for thematic role assignment. Being German a case-marked language, it uses case information to reveal relations between sentential arguments. Case is indeed the most reliable cue for a correct sentence interpretation. However, as previous research has shown (e.g. Mills 1977; MacWhinney 1978; Clahsen 1984; Poeppel & Wexler 1993; Schipke et al. 2012), case sensitivity only emerges at later stages in language development. How and when do young German children come to comprehend non-canonical sentences then? Other earlier accessible factors, which have been shown to support correct sentence comprehension in German, are animacy and number information (Brandt & Höhle 2010; Stegenwallner-Schütz & Adani 2017, Adani et al. 2017). The main purpose of the current study is to investigate how animacy and number dissimilarities interact with word order in supporting the correct interpretation of simple transitive sentences by German-speaking children, before they actually develop a fully-fledged sensitivity to case marking.