This study investigates whether the use of prosodic cues during instruction facilitates the processing of German accusative case markers. Two groups of third semester L1 English learners of L2 German completed Processing Instruction (PI) with aural input: Learners in the PI+P group heard sentences that included focused prosodic cues; learners in the PI group heard sentences with monotone prosody. The effects of training were assessed through an offline comprehension task, a written production task, and an online self-paced reading (SPR) task. The results for the offline tasks showed that the groups were similar with respect to their offline comprehension and production. The SPR task showed that both groups used case markers to interpret word order online to some extent; however, only the PI+P group did so in all conditions. These results suggest that prosody does play a role in (morpho)syntactic processing, and that covert activation of prosodic structures can facilitate processing during online reading tasks.

本研究调查在教学过程中使用韵律线索是否有助于处理德语宾格标记。两组第三学期的 L1 英语学习者 L2 德语完成了带有听觉输入的处理指令 (PI)：PI+P 组的学习者听到了包含集中韵律提示的句子；PI组的学习者听到的是单调韵律的句子。通过离线理解任务、书面制作任务和在线自定进度阅读 (SPR) 任务评估培训效果。线下任务的结果表明，这些小组在线下理解和生产方面是相似的。SPR 任务表明，两组都在一定程度上使用格标记来在线解释词序；然而，只有 PI+P 组在所有条件下都这样做。