Crossed and nested dependencies in German and Dutch

Abstract The clause-final verbal clusters in Standard Dutch and German differ strikingly in the kinds of dependencies they normally permit between verbs and their arguments, with Dutch preferring crossed dependencies and German nested. This study investigates the consequences of these differences for the psycholinguistic processing complexity of sentences containing either crossed or nested dependencies. German and Dutch subjects performed two tasks-ratings of comprehensibility and a test of successful comprehension-on matched sets of sentences which varied in complexity from a simple sentence to one containing three levels of embedding. The results show no difference between Dutch and German for sentences within the normal range (up to one level of embedding), but with a significant preference emerging for the Dutch crossed order for the more complex strings. We argue that this rules out the push-down stack as the universal basis for the human parsing mechanism.