Agreement attraction in grammatical sentences and the role of the task

Abstract

This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that make predictions for sentences like “The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...”. Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb in sentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interference accounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with singular distractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlier research, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here is inconclusive. One possible explanation that has not yet been considered is that both effects occur simultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conducted three single-trial self-paced reading experiments (N1 = 4, 296, N2 = 3, 920, N3 = 3, 559) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitory interference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreement attraction but none for inhibitory interference. Experiment 4 (N4 = 3, 535) tested the effect of the task (comprehension questions vs. acceptability judgments used in Experiments 1–3) and showed neither agreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstrate that agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlier research – but also that these effects crucially depend on task demands. This finding explains inconsistent results in prior research and it creates challenges, and opportunities, for future research.

Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects

“…Likewise, the metanalysis of Jäger et al ( 2017 ) found evidence in favor of inhibitory interference in neither subject-verb agreement nor antecendent-reflexive structures. This is also in line with a recent meta-analysis and results of Laurinavichyute and von der Malsburg ( 2023 ), who found no evidence for inhibitory interference in grammatical sentences either in the hither-to published literature or in their own experiments using subject-verb agreement in English. Our study, therefore, sheds further doubt on these effects.…”

Number Agreement Attraction in Czech and English Comprehension: A Direct Experimental Comparison

“…Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2022), but also the number of fillers. Possibly, task adaptation effects (Fine et al, 2013;Arehalli & Wittenberg, 2021;Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2023) may have influenced results of different studies to a different extent. Moreover, it is unlikely that more subtle differences in the methodologies of different experiments would have been replicated directly, for example, the wording of instructions, font sizes or the experimental software/platform.…”

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

“…reflect differences in answering preferences occasioned by the different balance of nonsubject-like bare noun distractor/subject-like modified distractor conditions in Experiment 4. Hammerly et al (2019) and Türk (2022) show that response biases can change the qualitative pattern of agreement errors in acceptability judgment tasks (see also Laurinavichyute & von der Malsburg, 2023). Hammerly et al (2019) found that agreement attraction errors may vary with response bias, depending on whether participants expect the sentence they see to be ungrammatical to a lesser or greater extent.…”