Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction

Abstract

It has been well established that subject-verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

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

“…the keys to the cabinet). This effect has been quite robust in production (e.g., Eberhard, 1997;Staub, 2009), and has also been shown in comprehension measures including reading time (Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009;Patson & Husband, 2016) and acceptability judgments (Häussler, 2009) in a variety of different languages.…”

A Self‐Organizing Approach to Subject–Verb Number Agreement

“…Even if the correct N1‐headed structure forms in the end, allowing for correct thematic role assignment, the plural feature on N2 can sometimes push the verb's number feature into its plural state. SOSP, in its general form, also assumes feature flexibility in the N1 treelet after the N1 has been perceived, so the treatment just described is also consistent with the result of Patson and Husband () who found that cases of [Det N1[sg] Prep Det N2[pl]] were interpreted as having a plural N1 (in comprehension questions) more often than in the singular‐singular case. It is noteworthy that SOSP treats classical agreement attraction cases by the same mechanism (structure formation) as it treats the pseudopartitive cases.…”

Cues, quantification, and agreement in language comprehension

“…I n c om p r e h e ns i o n , c o nc e p t u al a n d morphosyntactic number information about a to-beconveyed message is not always available to the comprehender during first-pass comprehension, leading to an increased role for predictive processes and retrievals when prediction fails (see Tanner et al, 2014, for more detailed discussion), at least during initial processing. However, some evidence now suggests that global number representations (as conceived by the MM model) can be important in very late measures of comprehension (Patson & Husband, 2015; see also Kreiner, Garrod, & Sturt, 2013).…”