Gender and number agreement in comprehension in Spanish

Acuña-Fariña, Juan Carlos; Meseguer, Enrique; Carreiras, Manuel

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.01.013

Cited by 43 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…Consistent with previous work on agreement attraction that has identified an asymmetry between number features in determining agreement attraction (Bock & Miller 1991;Bock & Eberhard 1993;Vigliocco et al 1995;1996;Vigliocco & Nicol 1998;Bock et al 2001;Hartsuiker et al 2003;Alcocer & Phillips 2009;Bock et al 2012;Acuña-Fariña et al 2014;Jegerski 2016), we found that native speakers of Spanish exhibit clear effects of attraction for number: ungrammatical sentences with a singular NP1 but plural NP2 and ADJ were rated higher than other cases of ungrammaticality. Also consistent with the previous literature, we failed to find evidence of attraction for gender.…”

supporting

confidence: 91%

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In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the morphosyntax of number and gender agreement in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. Our study builds on the experimental paradigm of agreement attraction developed by Fuchs et al. (2015) and elicits responses to agreement failures to diagnose the potentially-independent contributions of number and gender features. By comparing the structuring of these agreement categories in native and heritage Spanish, we document a case of grammatical divergence: heritage speakers restructure their agreement categories, favoring fewer feature values and less structure. The principled nature of this restructuring demonstrates that the loss of agreement in heritage languages is not superficial or accidental, but rather follows from predictable structural changes.

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supporting

confidence: 91%

“…We also wanted to ensure that the target of agreement was the same for both gender and number (i.e., the predicative adjective), thus allowing for direct comparison across feature types (cf. Acuña-Fariña et al 2014, who also compared two feature types).…”

Section: Testing Heritage Speakersmentioning

confidence: 99%

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…We could find only two studies examining gender agreement attraction in comprehension: Acuña-Fariña et al (2014) and Martin et al (2014). Both looked at Spanish, eye-tracking was used in the first and ERPs in the second.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Gender Agreement Attraction in Russian: Production and Comprehension Evidence

Slioussar

Malko

2016

Front. Psychol.

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Agreement attraction errors (such as the number error in the example “The key to the cabinets are rusty”) have been the object of many studies in the last 20 years. So far, almost all production experiments and all comprehension experiments looked at binary features (primarily at number in Germanic, Romance, and some other languages, in several cases at gender in Romance languages). Among other things, it was noted that both in production and in comprehension, attraction effects are much stronger for some feature combinations than for the others: they can be observed in the sentences with singular heads and plural dependent nouns (e.g.,“The key to the cabinets…”), but not in the sentences with plural heads and singular dependent nouns (e.g., “The keys to the cabinet…”). Almost all proposed explanations of this asymmetry appeal to feature markedness, but existing findings do not allow teasing different approaches to markedness apart. We report the results of four experiments (one on production and three on comprehension) studying subject-verb gender agreement in Russian, a language with three genders. Firstly, we found attraction effects both in production and in comprehension, but, unlike in the case of number agreement, they were not parallel (in production, feminine gender triggered strongest effects, while neuter triggered weakest effects, while in comprehension, masculine triggered weakest effects). Secondly, in the comprehension experiments attraction was observed for all dependent noun genders, but only for a subset of head noun genders. This goes against the traditional assumption that the features of the dependent noun are crucial for attraction, showing the features of the head are more important. We demonstrate that this approach can be extended to previous findings on attraction and that there exists other evidence for it. In total, these findings let us reconsider the question which properties of features are crucial for agreement attraction in production and in comprehension.

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“…One suggests that both production and comprehension effects are due to an inaccurate representation of the complex subject, in which the number feature of the embedded attractor noun erroneously migrates upward and is used to mark the entire subject NP (Nicol et al, 1997 ). Indeed, the observed reading time effects on grammatical stimuli from two online comprehension studies (Pearlmutter et al, 1999 ;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009 ) have been argued by Wagers et al to refl ect spillover of a basic NP number effect rather than true attraction effects, though there remain at least two studies that have provided more solid evidence of agreement attraction effects in the comprehension of grammatical sentences (Acuña-Fariña et al, 2014 ;Nicol et al, 1997 ). A second type of theory has proposed that agreement attraction effects arise not in the actual representation of number agreement but rather during the subsequent retrieval of the relevant features on the subject for the purposes of checking agreement on the verb, which only occurs when verbal morphology is inconsistent with the number that had been predicted on processing the subject.…”

Section: Agreement Attractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Number Attraction Effects in Near-Native Spanish Sentence Comprehension

Jegerski

2014

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The present investigation examined the online comprehension of subject-verb number agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Mexican Spanish using the more subtle agreement attraction paradigm, with stimuli grammatical in both conditions, in addition to a nonlocal grammaticality paradigm. The results of a selfpaced reading experiment confi rmed that nonnatives can acquire nativelike online sensitivity to verbal number agreement, even without grammar errors, and that such sensitivity develops only at very high levels of L2 profi ciency.

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Gender and number agreement in comprehension in Spanish

Cited by 43 publications

References 69 publications

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Gender Agreement Attraction in Russian: Production and Comprehension Evidence

Number Attraction Effects in Near-Native Spanish Sentence Comprehension

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