Structural topic marking: Evidence from the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with adverbs

- Structural topic marking modulates subject-before-object preference in German.
- Accusative object-before-subject orders improve if object DP is in topic position.
- Position of sentence adverb/local adverbial differentially affects processing load.
- Information structure impacts error detection in double case violations.
- Evidence supports model of topics as addresses in discourse representation.

The results of two German speeded acceptability-judgement experiments suggest that placing a DP in the position before a sentence adverb in the German middle field, which has been argued to be a structural topic position (Frey, 2004), has an impact on sentence processing. In object-before-subject orders, placing an object DP, whose referent is not normally topical, in the topic position increases acceptability and reduces acceptance latencies compared to structures where the object DP does not appear in the topic position. For subject-before-object orders, placing the subject, which is a typical topic, in the topic position does not yield such processing advantages. Locative adverbials, which do not mark topic boundaries, do not affect the processing of subject-object asymmetries in the way that sentence adverbs do. I suggest that these effects can be explained if Frey's topic position is indeed a topic position, and if topics serve as addresses in a structured mental representation of the discourse (cf. Repp and Drenhaus, 2015). Furthermore, evidence is provided for an influence of topic marking on the detection of case errors in ungrammatical structures with two DPs that are marked with the same case. Error detection also was found to be influenced by linear closeness.