@article{LagoHuvelleGracaninYuksekSafaketal.2018,
  author    = {Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol and Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina and Safak, Duygu Fatma and Demir, Orhan and Kirkici, Bilal and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Straight from the horse's mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors},
  series = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism},
  volume    = {9},
  journal   = {Linguistic approaches to bilingualism},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {John Benjamins Publishing Co.},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {1879-9264},
  doi       = {10.1075/lab.17019.lag},
  pages     = {398 -- 426},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {We investigated the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Turkish-German bilinguals using two tasks. The first task elicited speeded judgments to verb number violations in sentences that contained plural genitive modifiers. We addressed whether these modifiers elicited attraction errors, which have supported the use of a memory retrieval mechanism in monolingual comprehension studies. The second task examined the comprehension of a language-specific constraint of Turkish against plural-marked verbs with overt plural subjects. Bilinguals showed a reduced application of this constraint, as compared to Turkish monolinguals. Critically, both groups showed similar rates of attraction, but the bilingual group accepted ungrammatical sentences more often. We propose that the similarity in attraction rates supports the use of the same retrieval mechanism, but that bilinguals have more problems than monolinguals in the mapping of morphological to abstract agreement features during speeded comprehension, which results in increased acceptability of ungrammatical sentences.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{LaurinavichyutevonderMalsburg2022,
  author    = {Laurinavichyute, Anna and von der Malsburg, Titus},
  title     = {Semantic attraction in sentence comprehension},
  series = {Cognitive science},
  volume    = {46},
  journal   = {Cognitive science},
  number    = {2},
  publisher = {Wiley},
  address   = {Hoboken},
  issn      = {0364-0213},
  doi       = {10.1111/cogs.13086},
  pages     = {38},
  year      = {2022},
  abstract  = {Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun ("The key to the cabinets were horizontal ellipsis "). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory. In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{LagoHuvelleFelser2018,
  author    = {Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol and Felser, Claudia},
  title     = {Agreement attraction in native and nonnative speakers of German},
  series = {Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners},
  volume    = {39},
  journal   = {Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners},
  number    = {3},
  publisher = {Cambridge Univ. Press},
  address   = {New York},
  issn      = {0142-7164},
  doi       = {10.1017/S0142716417000601},
  pages     = {619 -- 647},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {Second language speakers often struggle to apply grammatical constraints such as subject-verb agreement. One hypothesis for this difficulty is that it results from problems suppressing syntactically unlicensed constituents in working memory. We investigated which properties of these constituents make them more likely to elicit errors: their grammatical distance to the subject head or their linear distance to the verb. We used double modifier constructions (e.g., the smell of the stables of the farmers), where the errors of native speakers are modulated by the linguistic relationships between the nouns in the subject phrase: second plural nouns, which are syntactically and semantically closer to the subject head, elicit more errors than third plural nouns, which are linearly closer to the verb (2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry). In order to dissociate between grammatical and linear distance, we compared embedded and coordinated modifiers, which were linearly identical but differed in grammatical distance. Using an attraction paradigm, we showed that German native speakers and proficient Russian speakers of German exhibited similar attraction rates and that their errors displayed a 2nd-3rd-noun asymmetry, which was more pronounced in embedded than in coordinated constructions. We suggest that both native and second language learners prioritize linguistic structure over linear distance in their agreement computations.},
  language  = {en}
}