How gender affects number: cue-based retrieval in agreement production

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

“…This is consistent with work that shows how grammatical gender can help speakers locate the correct subject nouns, both for production (Lorimor et al, 2015) and for comprehension (Adani, van der Lely, Forgiarini, & Guasti, 2010;Belletti, Friedmann, Brunato, & Rizzi, 2012). The mechanism of cue-based retrieval would not replace other models of agreement, such as the Competition model (Mirković & MacDonald, 2013), or Marking and Morphing (Eberhard et al, 2005), but would operate as an error-driven mechanism once the form of the verb had been computed.…”

“…However, it is possible that the effects of gender match could be explained with cue-based retrieval, similar to the effect of gender match on agreement attraction in Spanish (Lorimor et al, 2015), as speakers could be keeping track of the gender of the nouns, which they would use to help retrieve the subject at the point they are planning the verb. In such a scenario, if the two nouns have different genders, this would make it easier for speakers to keep track of the fact that there were two distinct nouns within the subject NP, leading to less singular agreement in the gender mismatch condition, compared with the gender match condition.…”

“…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. Specifically, when speakers of both varieties of Spanish produced overt subjects (Experiment 1; Foote & Bock, 2012), they made fewer errors in number agreement when the head and local nouns had different grammatical genders than when they had the same gender.…”

“…Given that the reduction in number agreement errors occurred in both language varieties when the head and local nouns had different grammatical genders, this demonstrates that the "sparseness" explanation is unable to account for the full pattern of morphophonological effects in Spanish. Instead, Lorimor et al (2015) argue that grammatical gender can serve as a cue that facilitates correct retrieval of the subject head noun when the speaker is planning the verb. They propose that the agreement patterns in Foote and Bock (2012) are best understood by combining a model like Marking and Morphing (Eberhard et al, 2005), which can explain how the form of the verb is originally computed, with a cue-based retrieval model, in which a speaker would use the gender cues from the head and local nouns to verify that the subject and verb agree.…”

Straight from the horse's mouth: agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors

“…feature percolation : Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002;marking and morphing: Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005), recent studies have proposed that attraction errors in comprehension mainly occur due to interference during cue-based memory retrieval (Wagers et al, 2009;Dillon et al, 2013;Tanner et al, 2014; for proposals in production, see Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Lorimor, Jackson, & Foote, 2015). Further, several findings suggest that memory retrieval is engaged as a repair or error-driven process.…”