Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes

Wagers, Matthew; Lau, Ellen; Phillips, Colin

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.04.002

Cited by 393 publications

(841 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…This characterization also seems satisfactory to explain the failure of otro as a retrieval cue; there is no entry in memory that otro picks out-except in the Incorrect Attractor-different case, where vestido occurs prior to otro. This condition may induce a local attraction between cue and illicit antecedent that does not occur when there is a matching and also licit item in memory, although our results do not bear evidence for this hypothesis (but see Wagers et al, 2009). Cue-diagnosticity-based attraction thus offers an explanation for the difference between the two Correct conditions-if the attractor noun does not match the features of the antecedent, then local mismatch between the attractor and the correct determiner also impacts ongoing neural processing-as well as for the reduction of the sustained negativity for the Incorrect condition in the presence of a local cue-matching attractor.…”

Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Comprecontrasting

confidence: 80%

“…This pattern seems related in spirit to instances of so-called "local coherence," where local constraints can sometimes outweigh global ones, producing "illusions" of grammaticality Tabor et al, 2004). A similar phenomenon of attraction errors during subject-verb agreement production has been welldocumented in production (e.g., Bock and Miller, 1991;Staub, 2009) and in comprehension in certain cases (Pearlmutter et al, 1999;Wagers et al, 2009). Anaphor resolution has also shown vulnerability to interference that could be attributed to differences in cue-diagnosticity (Badecker and Straub, 2002;Sturt, 2003).…”

Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Comprementioning

confidence: 82%

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Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension

2012

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Successful language use requires access to products of past processing within an evolving discourse. A central issue for any neurocognitive theory of language then concerns the role of memory variables during language processing. Under a cue-based retrieval account of language comprehension, linguistic dependency resolution (e.g., retrieving antecedents) is subject to interference from other information in the sentence, especially information that occurs between the words that form the dependency (e.g., between the antecedent and the retrieval site). Retrieval interference may then shape processing complexity as a function of the match of the information at retrieval with the antecedent versus other recent or similar items in memory. To address these issues, we studied the online processing of ellipsis in Castilian Spanish, a language with morphological gender agreement. We recorded event-related brain potentials while participants read sentences containing nounphrase ellipsis indicated by the determiner otro/a ('another'). These determiners had a grammatically correct or incorrect gender with respect to their antecedent nouns that occurred earlier in the sentence. Moreover, between each antecedent and determiner, another noun phrase occurred that was structurally unavailable as an antecedent and that matched or mismatched the gender of the antecedent (i.e., a local agreement attractor). In contrast to extant P600 results on agreement violation processing, and inconsistent with predictions from neurocognitive models of sentence processing, grammatically incorrect determiners evoked a sustained, broadly distributed negativity compared to correct ones between 400 and 1000 ms after word onset, possibly related to sustained negativities as observed for referential processing difficulties. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the attractor: an increased negativity was observed for grammatically correct determiners that did not match the gender of the attractor, suggesting that structurally unavailable noun phrases were at least temporarily considered for grammatically correct ellipsis. These results constitute the first ERP evidence for cue-based retrieval interference during comprehension of grammatical sentences.

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Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Comprecontrasting

confidence: 80%

Section: Cue-based Retrieval and Cue-diagnosticity In Sentence Comprementioning

confidence: 82%

Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension

2012

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“…Recent research has also highlighted the occasionally errorprone nature of agreement in comprehension, and specifically shown that agreement processing in comprehension can also be somewhat fragile and show gradient effects of grammaticality when a subject NP contains potentially ambiguous or misleading cues to the grammatical number of the subject (e.g., Tanner, Nicol, & Brehm, 2014;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009). In light of this, some important research goals are to better understand (1) the range of cues used in the processing of agreement dependencies (e.g., those that modulate error rates and sensitivity to agreement relations), and (2) the potential convergence or divergence in the cues and mechanisms used during language production and comprehension.…”

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confidence: 99%

Cues, quantification, and agreement in language comprehension

Tanner

Bulkes

2015

Psychon Bull Rev

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We investigated factors that affect the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in English, using quantification as a window into the relationship between morphosyntactic processes in language production and comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical verbs, in which the plurality of the subject noun phrase was either doubly marked (via overt plural quantification and morphological marking on the noun) or singly marked (via only plural morphology on the noun). Both acceptability judgments and the ERP data showed heightened sensitivity to agreement violations when quantification provided an additional cue to the grammatical number of the subject noun phrase, over and above plural morphology. This is consistent with models of grammatical comprehension that emphasize feature prediction in tandem with cue-based memory retrieval. Our results additionally contrast with those of prior studies that showed no effects of plural quantification on agreement in language production. These findings therefore highlight some nontrivial divergences in the cues and mechanisms supporting morphosyntactic processing in language production and comprehension.

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“…The regions of interest consisted of the pronoun (R4) and the three words following it (R5-7), because self-paced reading effects typically spill over after the critical word (Wagers et al, 2009;Parker & Phillips, 2016;Lago, Shalom, Sigman, Lau, & Phillips, 2015). To avoid analyzing each of the three spillover regions separately, which could increase the likelihood of Type 1 errors (von der Malsburg & Angele, 2016), the three regions were averaged on a trial-by-trial basis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Speeded acceptability judgments provide a time-sensitive measure that has been shown to reliably mirror processing effects by requiring participants to rely on their working memory to construct a representation of the sentence and by restricting the amount of time that they have to reflect on their acceptability intuitions (Drenhaus, Saddy, & Frisch, 2005;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009;Parker & Phillips, 2016).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of native and non-native grammars in the comprehension of possessive pronouns

Lago¹,

Garcia²,

Felser³

2018

Preprint

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Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals’ prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during processing. We use speeded judgments and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension of German possessive pronouns. To investigate whether native and non-native grammars differentially affect participants' performance, we compare two groups of non-native German speakers with inverse L1-L2 distributions: a group with L1 SPANISH-L2 ENGLISH, and a group with L1 ENGLISH-L2 SPANISH. We show that the reading profiles of both groups are modulated by their L1 grammar, with L2 proficiency selectively affecting participants' judgment accuracy but not their reading times. We propose that reading comprehension is mainly influenced by multilinguals’ native grammar, but that knowledge of an L2 grammar can further increase sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in an additional language.

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Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes

Cited by 393 publications

References 41 publications

Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension

Event-related brain potentials index cue-based retrieval interference during sentence comprehension

Cues, quantification, and agreement in language comprehension

The role of native and non-native grammars in the comprehension of possessive pronouns

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