Instead of an accidental by-product of phonological and morphological changes, then, a new picture emerges for explaining syncretism in Modern High German definite articles: German speakers have been able to reduce their case paradigm without loss in processing and interpretation efficiency.
the impact of representation on processing is illustrated at the bottom of Figure 1, which shows the performance of a grammar that uses the same processing technique for handling the same utterance, but a different representation than the disjunctive grammar.