Applied Psycholinguistics 31 (2010), 619–633 doi:10.1017/S0142716410000160 The use of pronominal case in English sentence interpretation YUKI YOSHIMURA University of Massachusetts, Amherst BRIAN MACWHINNEY Carnegie Mellon University Received: July 27, 2007 Accepted for publication: June 7, 2009 ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Yuki Yoshimura, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 161 Presidents Drive, Amherst, MA 01003. E-mail: yyuki@asianlan.umass.edu ABSTRACT This study examined adult English native speakers’ processing of sentences in which pronominal case marking conflicts with word order. Previous research has shown that English speakers rely heavily on word order for assigning case roles during sentence interpretation. However, in terms of cue reliability measures, we should expect English pronominal case to be nearly as strong a cue as word order. The current study examined this issue by asking subjects to interpret grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in which case competes with word order. The results indicated that word order remains the strongest cue in English, even when the case-marking cue is available. However, for noncanonical word orders, the case-marking cue had a strong effect on sentence interpretation. In over 40 published studies, the competition model (MacWhinney, 1987, 2005; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) has been used to study crosslinguistic differences in sentence processing. In these studies, cues such as word order, agreement marking, case marking, or animacy are placed into competition in a crossed factorial (analysis of variance [ANOVA]) design, thereby allowing us to determine the relative patterns of cue strength across languages. The overwhelming majority of these studies have utilized combinations of both grammatical sentences such as the dog chases the bear and ungrammatical sentences such as the bear the dogs chases. These sentences are composed of two full noun phrases (NPs) and a single transitive verb. The participant’s task is to decide which noun is the actor. To date, the only competition model study that has examined processing with pronouns instead of full NPs is McDonald (1986) for Dutch. This emphasis in competition model experiments on sentences with full NPs is potentially a serious problem. Competition model experiments have repeatedly shown that cue strength is a function of cue reliability. However, it could be that this finding does not extend to sentences that combine pronouns with full NPs. We know that full © Cambridge University Press 2010 0142-7164/10 $15.00