Number attraction in verb and anaphor production

Abstract

Although reflexive–antecedent agreement shows little susceptibility to number attraction in comprehension, prior production research using the preamble-completion paradigm has demonstrated attraction for both verbs and anaphora. In four production experiments, we compared number attraction effects on subject–verb and reflexive–antecedent agreement using a novel scene-description task in addition to a more traditional preamble elicitation paradigm. While the results from the preamble task align with prior findings, the more naturalistic scene description task produced the same contrast observed in comprehension, with robust verb attraction but minimal anaphor attraction. In addition to analyzing agreement error distributions, we also analyzed the production time-course of participant responses, finding timing effects that pattern with error distributions, even when no error is present. The results suggest that production agreement processes show similar profiles to comprehension processes. We discuss potential sources of variable susceptibility to agreement attraction, suggesting that differences may arise from the time-course of information processing across tasks and linguistic dependencies.

Agreement attraction error and timing profiles in continuous speech

“…Franck et al, 2002). In fact, when we elicited the target sentences from our scene-description paradigm using a preamble elicitation task (Kandel & Phillips, 2022), the markedness asymmetry widened: we observed errors in 3% of SS trials and 16% of SP trials (a 13% point difference) compared to 4% of PP trials and 9% of PS trials (a 5% point difference). Consequently, it may be the case that the markedness asymmetry in natural production is more graded than in tasks like preamble paradigms that rely on comprehension and repetition of a sentence fragment to guide production planning.…”

“…This study comprises two experiments investigating subject-verb agreement attraction in production. Experiment 1 was originally conducted in the lab as a part of a larger study executed prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (and the ensuing halts on in-person research) comparing subject-verb agreement with anaphor-antecedent agreement (Kandel & Phillips, 2022). This comparison was performed between participants and thus should have no bearing on the present results.…”

“…Our paradigm thus differs from previous description paradigms by asking participants to describe an action rather than a property of the subject referent (both Nozari &Omaki, 2022 and elicited descriptions of the subject referent's color). The decision to elicit sentences with novel words was motivated by the planned comparison to reflexive attraction in Kandel and Phillips (2022), as it allowed us to flexibly alter the argument structure of the verb mim to elicit different linguistic constructions while holding the verb constant.…”

Agreement attraction error and timing profiles in continuous speech

“…This study comprises two experiments investigating subject-verb agreement attraction in production. Experiment 1 was originally conducted in the lab as a part of a larger study comparing subject-verb agreement attraction with anaphor-antecedent agreement attraction (Kandel & Phillips, 2021). The comparison with anaphor-antecedent agreement in the original study was performed between participants, so the comparison should have no bearing on the present results.…”

“…Given the prevalence of verb attraction errors in production experiments and the ease of their identification, such attraction effects are an excellent candidate for testing the reliability of web-collected production data. Furthermore, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting halts on inperson human subjects research, we had already tested agreement attraction effects in the lab in a previous study (Kandel & Phillips, 2021). This in-lab experiment provided a useful source of comparison for our web-based experiment.…”