To understand a sentence, it is crucial to understand who is doing what. The interplay of morphological case marking, argument serialization, and animacy provides linguistic cues for the processing system to rapidly identify the thematic roles of the arguments. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates on-line brain responses during argument identification in Zurich German, a High Alemannic dialect, and in Fering, a North Frisian variety, which both exhibit reduced case systems as compared to Standard German. Like Standard German, Zurich German and Fering are Continental West Germanic varieties, and indeed argument processing in sentences with an object-before-subject order engenders a qualitatively similar ERP pattern of a scrambling negativity followed by a P600 in all tested varieties. However, the P600 component—a late positive ERP response, which has been linked to the categorization of task-relevant stimuli—is selectively affected by the most prominent cue for argument identification in each variety, which is case marking in Standard German, but animacy in Zurich German and Fering. Thus, even closely related varieties may employ different processing strategies based on the language-specific availability of syntactic and semantic cues for argument identification.*

中文翻译：

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大陆西日耳曼语中的案例融合、活力和词序：来自标准德语、苏黎世德语和 Fering（北弗里斯兰语）比较研究的神经语言学证据

要理解一个句子，了解谁在做什么是至关重要的。形态案例标记、论点序列化和动画性的相互作用为处理系统提供了语言线索，以快速识别论点的主题角色。目前的事件相关脑电位 (ERP) 研究调查了苏黎世德语（一种高级阿勒曼语方言）和 Fering（一种北弗里斯语方言）在争论识别过程中的在线大脑反应，与标准德语相比，它们都表现出减少的案例系统。与标准德语一样，苏黎世德语和 Fering 是大陆西日耳曼语变体，事实上，在句子中以宾语先于主语的顺序进行论证处理会在所有测试变体中产生一种质量相似的 ERP 模式，即加扰否定性后跟 P600。然而，P600 成分——与任务相关刺激的分类相关的晚期正向 ERP 反应——选择性地受到每个变体中最突出的论证识别线索的影响，在标准德语中是案例标记，但在苏黎世是活跃度德国和费林。因此，即使是密切相关的变体也可能采用不同的处理策略，具体取决于用于论元识别的句法和语义线索的语言特定可用性。*