Processing agreement in Hindi: When agreement feeds attraction

Same Sentences, Different Grammars, Different Brain Responses: An MEG study on Case and Agreement Encoding in Hindi and Nepali Split-Ergative Structures

“…If this is the right approach, our findings appear to conflict with Bhatia & Dillon's (2022) behavioral findings. Bhatia & Dillon find that, using an agreement-attraction paradigm (e.g.…”

“…Sauppe et al (2021) show that neural signatures diverge before the utterance of sentences beginning with ergative vs. bare subject NPs. In behavioral measures, Bhatia & Dillon (2022) demonstrate that sensitivity to agreement violations is selective to syntactic context, parallel to the grammatical description above. They argue that Hindi comprehenders must explicitly consider the syntactic context and track which NP is identified as the agreement controller, as a key process in agreement processing.…”

“…Subject-verb agreement dependencies are extensively studied in psycholinguistics as a window into the memory operations that support language comprehension (Nicol et al 1997; Badecker & Kumiak 2007; Wagers et al 2009; Dillon et al 2013), and as a window into the kinds of representations that are built in real-time (Bock & Miller 1991; Franck et al 2002; Bhatia & Dillon 2022; Chacón 2022). Subject-verb agreement processing likely consists of at least two distinct stages; the first involves identifying possible agreement controllers and predicting likely morphosyntactic features of the upcoming verb (Eberhard et al 2005; Wagers et al 2009; Bhatia & Dillon 2022; Chacón 2022), followed by retrieval of the subject NP’s features after the verb is encountered (Nicol et al 1997; Bedecker & Kumiak 2007; Wagers et al 2009; Dillon et al 2013).…”

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

“…There is a wealth of work that has explored specific illusions in depth by using targeted manipulations of sentence structure and lexical content, as well as grammatical differences between languages (e.g., O'Connor, 2015;Wellwood et al, 2018;Bhatia and Dillon, 2022;Orth et al, 2021;Frank and Ernst, 2019). This kind of work is highly valuable, but introduces the risk of overfitting theories to particular constructions instead of aiming to develop a "theory of everything".…”

Romanian (subject-like) DPs attract more than bare nouns: Evidence from speeded continuations

“…This prediction receives some support in the literature: semantic cues (Thornton & MacDonald, 2003), linear order (Haskell & MacDonald, 2005), syntactic position (Wagers, 2008) and arguably even relational syntactic features such as c-command (Franck & Wagers, 2020; see also Kush, Lidz & Philips, 2015) can increase the rate of attraction when the distractor is more similar to the target in the relevant feature. Some evidence suggests this is true even in languages where subjects are not necessarily agreement controllers: Bhatia and Dillon (2022) found that, in Hindi, distractors that control agreement in their own clause cause more attraction, regardless of what other case features or grammatical role they have. One generalization that unites all of these findings is that similarity to the target of retrieval-e.g., the subject-determines the strength of attraction for a given distractor.…”