The Reading Signatures of Agreement Attraction

Abstract

The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.

Syntactic and semantic interference in sentence comprehension: Support from English and German eye-tracking data

“…In the Discussion section, we proposed that the pre-critical syntactic and semantic interference effects could be due to encoding interference. To our minds, this explanation seems the most plausible; there are numerous studies that show reading time slowdowns consistent with encoding interference effects (e.g., Gordon et al, 2001;Gordon et al, 2006;Koesterich et al, 2021;Lago et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2021aSmith et al, , 2021bVillata et al, 2018). There is also some indication from interference studies that these effects may occur before the critical region is processed.…”

“…As mentioned earlier, Van Dyke (2007) (Experiment 3) reported a semantic interference effect at the pre-critical region. In addition, a recent study by Lago et al (2021) observed that interference effects emerged pre-critically in subject-verb number agreement dependencies. Recent computational modeling work has independently shown that encoding interference and cue-based retrieval processes are both in play during sentence processing .…”

“…However, leveling on its own does not account for the interference effects observed at the pre-critical region, because reduced activation should only affect retrieval, which is assumed to occur at the verb. One would need to add the assumption that competition between noun phrases for one or more features arises at the competitor and proceeds continuously, possibly slowing down processing at the pre-critical region (Lago et al, 2021;Villata et al, 2018). This would still not fully explain why the effects should be detected specifically at the pre-critical region, as opposed to the embedded distractor noun phrase (the point of encoding) or the verb (the point of retrieval).…”

Parsers and Grammars: A Tutorial Overview from the Linguistics Building

“…Starting in Bock and Miller [ 73 ], from which Example (28) is taken, a very large bibliography of so called attraction mistakes in production focuses on cases where an illegal attractor ( cabinets ) steals agreement away from the true head of a complex DP ( key ). The last twelve years or so have seen a steady increase in research on attraction from the comprehension standpoint (see [ 74 ] and [ 75 ] for reviews of production and comprehension research respectively). Descriptively, attraction is seen in comprehension when reading times in the verb area reflect little or no difficulty at all as compared with grammatical controls and when ungrammaticality detection is less accurate [ 76 , 77 , 78 ].…”

“…In Example (28) cabinets and are provide partial matching via the shared plural feature. It is fairly obvious that this illusion of grammaticality does not last long, hence, its status in the literature as a classic illusion; it is really easy to recover from it, and therefore, it exemplifies the distance between online and offline behavior (the literature on attraction has recently focused upon whether attraction in comprehension is indeed due to a retrieval process initiated at the verb, so after the DP subject phrase has already been encoded [ 79 ], or, instead, to encoding interference, that is difficulty in the initial memory encoding of items (the building of the subject DP node) observable prior to the appearance of a verb [ 75 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 ]).…”