Figure 2.

Example of an animated stimulus scene. In this scene the red square launches the blue ellipse. Arrows are added to indicate the movement direction of the objects on the computer screen. Stimuli of the same kind were used in all three conditions. Examples of the three response types are given below (S, sentence condition; NP, noun phrase condition; W, single word condition). The response types differed in the degree of syntactic encoding and the corresponding application of grammatical markers (printed in bold) in German. Local gender agreement marking on the adjective was required in noun phrase and sentence responses but not in the single-word responses. Only in the sentence condition did syntactic relations across several words have to be expressed by means of word order and inflection of the main verb.