Misretrieval but not misrepresentation: A feature misbinding account of post-interpretive effects in number attraction

Abstract

Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs, but no processing cost for grammatical verbs. While this has favoured cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband offered offline evidence suggesting that comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty noun phrase (NP) representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e., no number cue from verb). Although no online evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence rapid serial visual presentation experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband, suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.

Agreement attraction in grammatical sentences and the role of the task

“…Slowdowns in processing grammatical sentences with plural distractor nouns were found across three experiments, both when the distractor noun was a part of the subject noun phrase (Experiments 1 and 2) and when it was not (Experiment 3). Attraction effects in grammatical sentences are compatible with feature distortion accounts: the feature percolation account by Bock and Eberhard (1993), the marking and morphing account by Eberhard et al (2005, which better explains attraction effects in object relative clauses), and the attraction mechanism recently proposed by Dempsey et al (2022). In the latter account, the presence of a particular feature, in this case, plural, is remembered, but the mapping between the feature and the noun decays quickly.…”

“…The motivation for the three experiments presented above was to test whether parsing processes postulated by several feature distortion (Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Dempsey et al, 2022;Eberhard et al, 2005;Konieczny et al, 2004) and similarity-based interference accounts (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005;McElree, 2000) might be deployed simultaneously and their effects mask each other with stimuli typically used for testing these accounts. This hypothesis was not confirmed.…”

“…1, 2, 3B;Avetisyan et al, 2020, Expts. 2, 3;Brehm et al, 2019;Dempsey et al, 2022;Jäger et al, 2020;Lago et al, 2021;Paape et al, 2021;Parker and An, 2018;Tucker et al, 2015;Smith et al, 2021, Expt. 2).…”

“…In order to summarize and evaluate the accumulated evidence, we conducted a meta-analysis that included 16 estimates from the previous meta-analysis by Jäger et al (2017) and 15 new estimates from studies published more recently: Avetisyan et al, 2020;Brehm et al, 2019;Jäger et al, 2020;Lago et al, 2021;Nicenboim et al, 2018;Paape et al, 2021;Parker and An, 2018;Slioussar, 2018;Smith et al, 2021;Villata and Franck, 2020. 2 Some theoretically relevant studies could not be included in this meta-analysis: Two experiments reported by Patson and Husband (2016) were not included because the effect on the millisecond scale could not be inferred from the reported residual log reading times. A recent study by Dempsey et al (2022) was also not included because it did not target the subject-verb dependency, and therefore the predictions of the similarity-based interference accounts could not be evaluated.…”

“…(1-b) can create confusion about where the plural feature belongs (Dempsey et al, 2022;Konieczny et al, 2004). Both mechanisms would lead to slowdowns in the processing of the singular verb in (1-b) compared to (1-a), either because subject-verb agreement is perceived to be broken, or because it is difficult to establish the agreement.…”