Hierarchical structure and memory retrieval mechanisms in agreement attraction

Abstract

Speakers occasionally cause the verb to agree with an element that is not the subject, a so-called 'attractor'; likewise, comprehenders occasionally fail to notice agreement errors when the attractor agrees with the verb. Cross-linguistic studies converge in showing that attraction is modulated by the hierarchical position of the attractor in the sentence structure.We report two experiments exploring the link between structural position and memory representations in attraction. The method used is innovative in two respects: we used jabberwocky materials to control for semantic influences and focus on structural agreement processing, and we used a Speed-Accuracy Trade-off (SAT) design combined with a memory probe recognition task, as classically used in list memorization tasks. SAT allowed us to investigate the full time-course of processing and it enabled the joint measurement of retrieval speed and retrieval accuracy. Experiment 1 first established that attraction arises in jabberwocky sentences, to a similar extent and following the same structure-dependency as in natural sentences. Experiment 2 showed a close alignment between the attraction profiles found in Experiment 1 and memory parameters. Results support a content-addressable architecture of memory representations for sentences in which nouns' accessibility depends on their syntactic position, while subjects are kept in the focus of attention.

The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence

“…Vigliocco & Franck, 1999;Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Slioussar & Malkov, 2016), and has been examined using a wide variety of methodologies, among them self-paced reading, eye tracking, ERP, maze tasks, binary and scaled judgments, speed-accuracy tradeoff, free-choice production, and forced-choice production (e.g. Nicol, Forster, & Veres, 1997;Pearlmutter et al, 1999;Tanner, Nicol, & Brehm, 2014;Wagers et al, 2009;Franck & Wagers, 2015;Bock & Miller, 1991;Staub 2009).…”

Implicit Prosody and Cue-based Retrieval: L1 and L2 Agreement and Comprehension during Reading

“…Both syntactic and semantic/pragmatic cues can influence retrieval (Van Dyke and McElree, 2011), which allows not only for similarity-based interference on a lexical-featural level, but also frequency effects of lexical items or structural forms, which may account for processing asymmetries not accounted for by activation and decay alone. Wagers (2008) and Wagers et al (2009) suggest that structural features may also be incorporated as feature-cues—a proposal further explored in Franck and Wagers (2015). Combining the effects of hierarchy with structural position and semantic cues thus provides a robust system for encoding structure into the retrieval process.…”