The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence

Hammerly, Christopher; Staub, Adrian; Dillon, Brian

doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.01.001

Cited by 78 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Attraction takes place at stage two (morphing stage). Similarly to percolation accounts, the Marking and Morphing model predicts that in comprehension, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences will be affected due to the representation of the complex NP and there is evidence confirming this prediction (e.g., Solomon and Pearlmutter, 2004;Hammerly et al, 2019). At the same time, representational accounts would also expect attraction to occur only when the attractor is morphologically marked, which has also been confirmed in certain studies (Bock and Miller, 1991;Nicol et al, 1997;Staub, 2010;Santesteban et al, 2017).…”

Section: Background Agreement Attraction Accountsmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…Additionally, trials in which participants exceeded the response deadline (RTs > 1,700 ms) were deleted, influencing less than 3.6% of the dataset (Supplementary Material S3). In all cases, following the current literature on agreement attraction we report (a) the results from the logistic regression models with Grammaticality and Attractor as fixed effects with orthogonal contrasts (Grammaticality: grammatical = 0.5, ungrammatical = −0.5, Attractor: match = 0.5, mismatch = −0.5) as well as their interaction, and (b) planned pairwise comparisons employing logistic regression models between the grammatical match and the grammatical mismatch conditions and between the ungrammatical match and the ungrammatical mismatch conditions, given that the theoretical questions of interest crucially depend on whether attraction influences both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences or only ungrammatical sentences (e.g., Lago et al, 2015;Hammerly et al, 2019;, p. 12;Tanner et al, 2014, p. 12). Attractor was coded as a fixed effect in the pairwise comparisons, and the significance level was corrected for multiple comparisons using Bonferroni correction (significance level adjusted to p = 0.025).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, 104 filler sentences were constructed; half of them were ungrammatical including a variety of violations. The agreement target was in sentence-final position following the previous literature of s-GJTs (e.g., Tanner et al, 2014;Lago et al, 2018;Hammerly et al, 2019) and an adverb (Supplementary Material S5) was also added before the agreement target to increase the processing demands of the task ("John was looking for the recipe for the bread and (he) eventually found it").…”

Section: Materials and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension

Paspali

Marinis

2020

Front. Psychol.

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This work explores gender agreement attraction in comprehension. Attraction occurs when an agreement error (such as, "the key to the cabinets are rusty") goes unnoticed, leading to the illusion of grammaticality due to a mismatch between the value of the head and the value of a local intervening phase (attractor). According to retrieval accounts, these errors occur during cue retrieval from memory and predict illusions of grammaticality. Alternatively, representational accounts predict that the errors occur due to the faulty representation of certain features, thus, illusions of ungrammaticality are also expected. In four experiments we explore: (a) whether gender agreement attraction occurs in Greek and the strategy/-ies employed, (b) the role of the agreement target, (c) the timing of gender agreement attraction, (d) the role of phonological matching between the nominal inflectional morphemes of the attractor and the agreement target, and (e) participants' sensitivity to agreement when there is no conflict from the attractor. In all four experiments, the grammaticality of the sentence and the attractor value (match or mismatch with the head) and also the phonological matching between the attractor and the agreement target in ungrammatical sentences were manipulated. The agreement target was either an adjectival predicate or an object-clitic and the gender value of the head was feminine or neuter. Attraction was found in all measures during the timecourse of adjectival predicates (Experiment 1) and object-clitics (Experiment 2), and in timed (Experiment 3), and untimed (Experiment 4) judgments. Even more, both gender values showed attraction and the results mainly suggest that participants experience illusions of grammaticality, confirming retrieval accounts. Phonological matching did not modulate attraction in any of the experiments, suggesting that the similarity in the morphophonological realization between the agreement target and the attractor does not increase attraction. Furthermore, participants were sensitive to gender agreement violations in the absence of gender mismatch between the head and the attractor, suggesting that they respect agreement rules and have both neuter and feminine available in their feature content repertoire, although with some tendency in favor of neuter in feminine agreement contexts. The impact of these findings is discussed within the concept of attraction and sensitivity to agreement violations.

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Section: Background Agreement Attraction Accountsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Materials and Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension

Paspali

Marinis

2020

Front. Psychol.

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“…In recent years, computational implementations of psycholinguistic theories have become increasingly common (e.g., Hammerly, Staub, & Dillon, 2019; Nicenboim & Vasishth, 2018; Parker, 2019; Smith et al, 2018). This is a welcome development, but it raises the important question of how to conduct fair, quantitative model comparisons against human data; such model comparisons are vital if we want to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different models.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

Smith

Vasishth

2020

Cognitive Science

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Among theories of human language comprehension, cue‐based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long‐distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well‐established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye‐tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue‐based retrieval and self‐organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons.

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“…However, recent work by Hammerly et al (2019) has challenged the notion that grammatical asymmetry effects cannot be captured by misrepresentation models, such as Marking and Morphing. They show that, in presence of response bias, such models could indeed predict grammatical asymmetry effects in explicit decision tasks, such as speeded acceptability judgment tasks.…”

Section: Implications For the Representation And Processing Of Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attraction Effects for Verbal Gender and Number Are Similar but Not Identical: Self-Paced Reading Evidence From Modern Standard Arabic

2021

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Previous work on the comprehension of agreement has shown that incorrectly inflected verbs do not trigger responses typically seen with fully ungrammatical verbs when the preceding sentential context furnishes a possibly matching distractor noun (i.e., agreement attraction). We report eight studies, three being direct replications, designed to assess the degree of similarity of these errors in the comprehension of subject-verb agreement along the dimensions of grammatical gender and number in Modern Standard Arabic. A meta-analysis of the results demonstrate the presence of agreement attraction effects in reading comprehension for gender and number on verbs. Moreover, the meta-analysis demonstrates that these two features do not behave identically: gender effects are larger and occur later relative to number attraction effects. These results challenge models of agreement that predict agreement features to be equipotent and show that real-time models of agreement require modifications in the form of cue-weighting in order to account for these differential results.

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The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence

Cited by 78 publications

References 81 publications

Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension

Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension

A Principled Approach to Feature Selection in Models of Sentence Processing

Attraction Effects for Verbal Gender and Number Are Similar but Not Identical: Self-Paced Reading Evidence From Modern Standard Arabic

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