Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension

Abstract

Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four selfpaced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages.

The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

“…By manipulating notional and morphophonogical information with a construction that is likely to show a wide range of agreement patterns, the present experiments enhance our understanding of the mechanisms through which morphophonology affects subject-verb agreement (e.g. Antón-Méndez & Hartsuiker, 2010;Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Foote & Bock, 2012;Lago, Shalom, Sigman, Lau, & Phillips, 2015;Mirković & MacDonald, 2013), and address the degree to which current models of agreement can account for such effects.…”

“…If this is the case, we might see more singular verb agreement when the closest NP is an unambiguously singular het-noun, as the morphophonological cue on the nearest conjunct would lead to more singular agreement, compared to when the closest NP has a number-ambiguous determiner, de. However, Lago et al (2015) found that the robustness of number morphology of a local noun did not affect agreement attraction in comprehension, as attraction effects were similar in English and Spanish, even though Spanish has more robust morphology. Further, using reading-time measures, they showed that only a small portion of readers slowed down at the verb, which they interpreted as evidence that cue-based retrieval is an error-driven mechanism that only occurs when a listener encounters an ungrammatical verb.…”

“…In addition to these afore-mentioned models of agreement (Competition [Mirković & MacDonald, 2013] and Marking and Morphing [Eberhard et al, 2005]), other work has focused on the role of cue-based retrieval in agreement production and comprehension (Lago et al, 2015;Tanner, Nicol, & Brehm, 2014;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009; see also Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007). In a follow-up study on Foote and Bock's (2012) data from Mexican and Dominican Spanish, Lorimor, Jackson, and Foote (2015) showed that, while the robustness of the number morphology in Mexican versus Dominican Spanish could account for a significant difference in the rate of agreement attraction between the two languages, grammatical gender played an additional role in number agreement.…”

Agreement effects of gender and number in pronominal coreference processing in Brazilian Portuguese

“…(1) a) O [masc, sg] Lago et al (2015) compared agreement attraction in subjectverb dependencies in Spanish (another morphologically rich language similar to Brazilian Portuguese), and in English. Their results showed that Spanish comprehenders showed more processing difficulties in ungrammatical sentences than English comprehenders.…”

“…The authors explain that since agreement morphology is functionally 1 Sample of the materials of Lago et al (2015) Experiment in Spanish:…”