Agreement attraction in comprehension: representations and processes

@article{citeulike:1719899, abstract = {Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject-verb agreement (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are on the table', [Bock, J. K., \& Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45-93]), in which a verb erroneously takes on the agreement of an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined the online mechanisms underlying the analogous attraction effects that have been shown in comprehension; namely reduced disruption for subject-verb agreement violations when these 'attractor' nouns intervene. One class of theories suggests that these effects are rooted in faulty representation of the number of the subject, while another class of theories suggests that such effects arise rather in the process of re-accessing subject number at the verb. Two main findings provide evidence against the first class of theories. First, attraction also occurs in relative clause configurations in which the attractor noun does not intervene between subject and verb and is not in a direct structural relationship with the subject head (e.g., ‘The drivers who the runner wave to each morning’). Second, attraction effects were limited to ungrammatical sentences, which is unexpected under the assumption that the attractor number overwrites the subject number some proportion of the time. These results suggest that agreement attraction in comprehension is due not to errors in normal agreement representation, but rather reflects properties of the processes engaged by ungrammatical sentences when the correctly predicted agreement features fail to be instantiated on the verb.}, author = {Wagers, Matthew W. and Lau, Ellen F. and Phillips, Colin }, citeulike-article-id = {1719899}, journal = {Journal of Memory and Language}, keywords = {syntactic-variation}, posted-at = {2007-10-02 16:18:27}, priority = {2}, title = {Agreement attraction in comprehension: representations and processes}, url = {http://www.ling.umd.edu/colin/research/papers/wagerslau2007.pdf}, year = {submitted} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:1719899 L3 - citeulike-article-id:1719899 TI - Agreement attraction in comprehension: representations and processes JF - Journal of Memory and Language N2 - Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject-verb agreement (e.g., 'The key to the cabinets are on the table', [Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45-93]), in which a verb erroneously takes on the agreement of an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined the online mechanisms underlying the analogous attraction effects that have been shown in comprehension; namely reduced disruption for subject-verb agreement violations when these 'attractor' nouns intervene. One class of theories suggests that these effects are rooted in faulty representation of the number of the subject, while another class of theories suggests that such effects arise rather in the process of re-accessing subject number at the verb. Two main findings provide evidence against the first class of theories. First, attraction also occurs in relative clause configurations in which the attractor noun does not intervene between subject and verb and is not in a direct structural relationship with the subject head (e.g., ‘The drivers who the runner wave to each morning’). Second, attraction effects were limited to ungrammatical sentences, which is unexpected under the assumption that the attractor number overwrites the subject number some proportion of the time. These results suggest that agreement attraction in comprehension is due not to errors in normal agreement representation, but rather reflects properties of the processes engaged by ungrammatical sentences when the correctly predicted agreement features fail to be instantiated on the verb. KW - syntactic-variation AU - Wagers, Matthew AU - Lau, Ellen AU - Phillips, Colin PY - submitted/// UR - http://www.ling.umd.edu/colin/research/papers/wagerslau2007.pdf ER -