A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the “third construction” pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern’s low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern’s local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a “latent” construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available.

德语控制动词的一个子集允许其不定式补语的不连续线性化，这是一种称为“第三结构”模式的词序模式。与其他词序选项（特别是附加词）相比，第三种结构在当今的德语中非常罕见。这里我们问第三种构造模式的低出现频率是否可以通过处理因素来解释。我们报告了自定进度的阅读任务和生产启动任务的结果，调查第三种结构是否难以理解、难以生产或两者兼而有之。我们的结果表明，第三种构建模式的局部结构模糊性阻碍了理解，并且该模式也能抵抗启动。我们得出的结论是，这种词序模式是“潜在”结构的一个例子，它在语法上得到了许可，但在语言使用中强烈不受欢迎，因为有更容易处理的词序变体可用。