TY  - JOUR
A1  - Reifegerste, Jana
A1  - Hauer, Franziska
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging
BT  - evidence from subject-verb agreement in German
JF  - Aging, neuropsychology, and cognition : a journal on normal and dysfunctional development
N2  - Effects of aging on lexical processing are well attested, but the picture is less clear for grammatical processing. Where age differences emerge, these are usually ascribed to working-memory (WM) decline. Previous studies on the influence of WM on agreement computation have yielded inconclusive results, and work on aging and subject-verb agreement processing is lacking. In two experiments (Experiment 1: timed grammaticality judgment, Experiment 2: self-paced reading + WM test), we investigated older (OA) and younger (YA) adults’ susceptibility to agreement attraction errors. We found longer reading latencies and judgment reaction times (RTs) for OAs. Further, OAs, particularly those with low WM scores, were more accepting of sentences with attraction errors than YAs. OAs showed longer reading latencies for ungrammatical sentences, again modulated by WM, than YAs. Our results indicate that OAs have greater difficulty blocking intervening nouns from interfering with the computation of agreement dependencies. WM can modulate this effect.
KW  - Subject-verb agreement
KW  - attraction errors
KW  - aging
KW  - grammaticality judgment
KW  - self-paced reading
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2016.1251550
SN  - 1382-5585
SN  - 1744-4128
VL  - 24
IS  - 6
SP  - 672
EP  - 702
PB  - Taylor & Francis Group
CY  - Abingdon
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Brandt-Kobele, Oda-Christina
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - The detection of subject-verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study
JF  - Lingua : international review of general linguistics
N2  - This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.
KW  - Subject-verb agreement
KW  - Eye-tracking
KW  - Language acquisition
KW  - German
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.008
SN  - 0024-3841
SN  - 1872-6135
VL  - 144
SP  - 7
EP  - 20
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -