Passivization played a central role in shaping both linguistic theory and psycholinguistic approaches to sentence processing, language acquisition and impairment. We present the results of two experiments that simultaneously test online processing (self-paced reading) and offline comprehension (through comprehension questions) of passives in German while also manipulating the event structure of the predicates used. In contrast to English, German passives are unambiguously verbal, allowing for the study of passivization independent of a confound in the degree of interpretive ambiguity (verbal/adjectival). In English, this ambiguity interacts with event structure, with passives of stative predicates naturally receiving an adjectival interpretation. In a recent study, Paolazzi et al. (2015, 2016) showed that in contrast to the mainstream theoretical perspective, passive sentences are not inherently harder to process than actives. Complexity of passivization in English is tied to the aspectual class of the verbal predicate passivized: with eventive predicates, passives are read faster (as hinted at in previous literature) and generate no comprehension difficulties (in contrast to previous findings with mixed predicates). Complexity effects with passivization, in turn, are only found with stative predicates. The asymmetry is claimed to stem from the temporary adjectival/verbal ambiguity of stative passives in English. We predict that the observed difficulty with English stative passives disappears in German, given that in this language the passive construction under investigation is unambiguously verbal. The results support this prediction: both offline and online there was no difficulty with passivization, under either eventive or stative predicates. In fact, passives and their rich morphology eased parsing across both types of predicates.

中文翻译：

---

处理德语中明确的被动动词

被动化在塑造句子处理、语言习得和障碍的语言理论和心理语言学方法方面发挥了核心作用。我们展示了两个实验的结果，这些实验同时测试了德语被动词的在线处理（自定进度阅读）和离线理解（通过理解问题），同时还操纵了所用谓词的事件结构。与英语相比，德语被动语是明确的语言，允许对被动化的研究独立于解释歧义程度（语言/形容词）的混淆。在英语中，这种歧义与事件结构相互作用，静态谓词的被动语自然接受形容词解释。在最近的一项研究中，Paolazzi 等人。（2015 年，2016）表明，与主流理论观点相比，被动句本身并不比主动句更难处理。英语中被动化的复杂性与被动化的动词谓词的体类有关：使用事件谓词，被动语读得更快（如以前的文献中所暗示的那样）并且不会产生理解困难（与以前的混合谓词研究结果相反）。反过来，被动化的复杂性效应只能在静态谓词中找到。据称，这种不对称源于英语中静态被动词的临时形容词/语言歧义。我们预测，观察到的英语静态被动语态的困难在德语中消失了，因为在这种语言中，所研究的被动结构是明确的语言。结果支持了这一预测：无论是离线还是在线，无论是在事件谓词还是静态谓词下，钝化都没有困难。事实上，被动语态及其丰富的形态简化了两种谓词的解析。