Processing agreement in Hindi: When agreement feeds attraction

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated robust agreement attraction effects in subject-verb agreement languages. It is an open question whether such attraction effects extend to languages whose agreement systems differ from this prototypical agreement pattern. To address this question, we conducted four forced-choice completion experiments investigating agreement processing in Hindi. Hindi has a mixed-agreement system, where subject-verb agreement and object-verb agreement occur in complementary structural contexts. We observed clear attraction effects in both subject and object agreement contexts. But we found little evidence that the distractor NP’s role, case or syntactic prominence modulated attraction. Rather, attraction occurred when the distractor was itself an agreement controller. We propose a Controller Coding account where Hindi speakers actively identify whether an NP is an agreement controller and encode this information in memory, with agreement interference arising primarily when multiple NPs are encoded as agreement controllers.

Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractors

“…A number of previous studies in comprehension (Nicol, Forster, & Veres, 1997;Pearlmutter, Garnsey, & Bock, 1999;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009) showed that participants found sentences like (1) acceptable more often and read them faster compared to their counterparts with a singular attractor. This phenomenon, known as agreement attraction (Bock & Miller, 1991) has been attested in a number of languages, such as in Arabic (Tucker, Idrissi, & Almeida, 2015), Armenian (Avetisyan, Lago, & Vasishth, 2020), German (Lago & Felser, 2018), Hindi (Bhatia & Dillon, 2020), Serbian (Ristic, Molinaro, & Mancini, 2016), Slovak (Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007), Spanish (Lago, Shalom, Sigman, Lau, & Phillips, 2015), and recently in Turkish (Lago et al, 2019).…”