TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Jarvis, Rebecca
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing
BT  - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - While much attention has been devoted to the cognition of aging multilingual individuals, little is known about how age affects their grammatical processing. We assessed subject-verb number-agreement processing in sixty native (L1) and sixty non-native (L2) speakers of German (age: 18-84) using a binary-choice sentence-completion task, along with various individual-differences tests. Our results revealed differential effects of age on L1 and L2 speakers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs). L1 speakers' RTs increased with age, and they became more susceptible to attraction errors. In contrast, L2 speakers' RTs decreased, once age-related slowing was controlled for, and their overall accuracy increased. We interpret this as resulting from increased L2 exposure. Moreover, L2 speakers' accuracy/RT patterns were more strongly affected by cognitive variables (working memory, interference control) than L1 speakers'. Our findings show that as regards bilinguals' grammatical processing ability, aging is associated with both gains (in experience) and losses (in cognitive abilities).
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction errors
KW  - second-language processing
KW  - aging
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2019.104083
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 111
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u.a.]
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Avetisyan, Serine
A1  - Lago, Sol
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.
KW  - subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction
KW  - Case
KW  - Eastern Armenian
KW  - cue-based
KW  - retrieval
KW  - comprehension
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 112
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  -