Abstract
Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were rusty), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of agreement attraction in comprehension have largely been limited to subject-verb number agreement, primarily in English, and while attraction in other agreement phenomena such as gender has been investigated in production, very few studies have focused on gender attraction in comprehension. We conducted five experiments investigating noun-adjective gender agreement during comprehension in Spanish. Our results indicate attraction effects during online sentence processing that are consistent with approaches ascribing attraction to interference during memory retrieval, rather than to a faulty representation of agreement features. We interpret our findings as consistent with the predictions of cue-based parsing.
Highlights
Existing studies of agreement attraction in comprehension have largely been limited to subject-verb number agreement, primarily in English, and while attraction in other agreement phenomena such as gender has been investigated in production, very few studies have focused on gender attraction in comprehension
Our results indicate attraction effects during online sentence processing that are consistent with approaches ascribing attraction to interference during memory retrieval, rather than to a faulty representation of agreement features
The increased interest in attraction effects in comprehension has in part been motivated by the role that agreement attraction has played as primary evidence within a wider literature on the memory architecture that underlies language comprehension (e.g. Lewis & Vasishth 2005; Wagers et al 2009; Dillon et al 2013; Lago et al 2015; Jäger et al 2017; Parker, Shvartsman & Van Dyke 2017; Villata, Tabor & Franck 2018; Hammerly, Staub & Dillon 2019)
Summary
Syntactic dependencies, which make up a large part of the grammatical information in an utterance and are crucial to comprehension, involve two or more elements (words or phrases) that should be processed or interpreted together (e.g., a subject and a verb, a noun and an adjective, a pronoun and its antecedent). In non-adjacent dependencies, intervening linguistic material increases the distance between the relevant elements. The processing of non-adjacent dependencies becomes challenging when this intervening linguistic material contains elements that have similar characteristics to the elements involved in the actual dependency (Jäger, Engelmann & Vasishth 2017). A classic example of this is subject-verb agreement attraction (e.g., *The money for the projects have been well administered by the board), where the verb’s number morphology agrees with an intervening noun phrase (the projects) instead of the subject’s head noun (the money). Debate here has focused on whether subjectverb agreement attraction results from a faulty representation of the relevant morphosyntactic features on the sentence subject, or from an error-prone memory retrieval mechanism
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