TY - JOUR A1 - Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Agreement attraction in native and nonnative speakers of German JF - Applied psycholinguistics : psychological and linguistic studies across languages and learners N2 - 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. KW - agreement attraction KW - German KW - linear distance KW - Russian Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716417000601 SN - 0142-7164 SN - 1469-1817 VL - 39 IS - 3 SP - 619 EP - 647 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago Huvelle, Maria Sol A1 - Gracanin-Yuksek, Martina A1 - Safak, Duygu Fatma A1 - Demir, Orhan A1 - Kirkici, Bilal A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Straight from the horse’s mouth Agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors JF - Linguistic approaches to bilingualism N2 - 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. KW - agreement attraction KW - bilingualism KW - Turkish Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17019.lag SN - 1879-9264 SN - 1879-9272 VL - 9 IS - 3 SP - 398 EP - 426 PB - John Benjamins Publishing Co. CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Namyst, Anna A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Lau, Ellen T1 - Antecedent access mechanisms in pronoun processing BT - evidence from the N400 T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun’s antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 568 KW - coreference KW - semantic priming KW - event-related potentials KW - sentence comprehension KW - N400 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433237 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 568 SP - 641 EP - 661 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Namyst, Anna A1 - Jäger, Lena Ann A1 - Lau, Ellen T1 - Antecedent access mechanisms in pronoun processing BT - evidence from the N400 JF - Language, cognition and neuroscience N2 - Previous cross-modal priming studies showed that lexical decisions to words after a pronoun were facilitated when these words were semantically related to the pronoun's antecedent. These studies suggested that semantic priming effectively measured antecedent retrieval during coreference. We examined whether these effects extended to implicit reading comprehension using the N400 response. The results of three experiments did not yield strong evidence of semantic facilitation due to coreference. Further, the comparison with two additional experiments showed that N400 facilitation effects were reduced in sentences (vs. word pair paradigms) and were modulated by the case morphology of the prime word. We propose that priming effects in cross-modal experiments may have resulted from task-related strategies. More generally, the impact of sentence context and morphological information on priming effects suggests that they may depend on the extent to which the upcoming input is predicted, rather than automatic spreading activation between semantically related words. KW - Coreference KW - semantic priming KW - event-related potentials KW - sentence comprehension KW - N400 Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1566561 SN - 2327-3798 SN - 2327-3801 VL - 34 IS - 5 SP - 641 EP - 661 PB - Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group CY - Abingdon ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Garcia, Anna Stutter A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - The role of native and non-native grammars in the comprehension of possessive pronouns JF - Second language research N2 - Previous studies have shown that multilingual speakers are influenced by their native (L1) and non-native (L2) grammars when learning a new language. But, so far, these studies have mostly used untimed metalinguistic tasks. Here we examine whether multilinguals’ prior grammars also affect their sensitivity to morphosyntactic constraints during processing. We use speeded judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension of German possessive pronouns. To investigate whether native and non-native grammars differentially affect participants’ performance, we compare two groups of non-native German speakers with inverse L1–L2 distributions: a group with L1 Spanish – L2 English, and a group with L1 English – L2 Spanish. We show that the reading profiles of both groups are modulated by their L1 grammar, with L2 proficiency selectively affecting participants’ judgment accuracy but not their reading times. We propose that reading comprehension is mainly influenced by multilinguals’ native grammar, but that knowledge of an L2 grammar can further increase sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations in an additional language. KW - comprehension KW - English KW - gender agreement KW - German KW - multilingualism KW - Spanish Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658318770491 SN - 0267-6583 SN - 1477-0326 VL - 35 IS - 3 SP - 319 EP - 349 PB - Sage Publ. CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Mertzen, Daniela A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - The benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven bilingualism research JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction between hypothesis testing and data exploration. This distinction helps researchers avoid casting post-hoc hypotheses and analyses as confirmatory ones. We argue that, in keeping with current best practices in the experimental sciences, preregistration, along with sharing data and code, should be an integral part of hypothesis-driven bilingualism research. KW - preregistration KW - open science KW - bilingualism KW - psycholinguistics KW - confirmatory analysis KW - exploratory analysis Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000031 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 5 SP - 807 EP - 812 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Shalom, Diego E. A1 - Sigman, Mariano A1 - Lau, Ellen F. A1 - Phillips, Colin T1 - Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension JF - Journal of memory and language N2 - Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KW - Agreement attraction KW - Number morphology KW - Spanish KW - Sentence comprehension Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.02.002 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 82 SP - 133 EP - 149 PB - Elsevier CY - San Diego ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Sloggett, Shayne A1 - Schlüter, Zoe A1 - Chow, Wing Yee A1 - Williams, Alexander A1 - Lau, Ellen A1 - Phillips, Colin T1 - Coreference and Antecedent Representation Across Languages JF - Journal of experimental psychology : Learning, memory, and cognition KW - coreference KW - German KW - English KW - sentence comprehension KW - eye-tracking Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000343 SN - 0278-7393 SN - 1939-1285 VL - 43 SP - 795 EP - 817 PB - American Psychological Association CY - Washington ER - TY - GEN A1 - Jacob, Gunnar A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Patterson, Clare T1 - L2 processing and memory retrieval: Some empirical and conceptual challenges T2 - Bilingualism : language and cognition. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916000948 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 20 SP - 691 EP - 693 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Stone, Kate A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Schad, Daniel T1 - Divergence point analyses of visual world data BT - applications to bilingual research JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Much work has shown that differences in the timecourse of language processing are central to comparing native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers. However, estimating the onset of experimental effects in timecourse data presents several statistical problems including multiple comparisons and autocorrelation. We compare several approaches to tackling these problems and illustrate them using an L1-L2 visual world eye-tracking dataset. We then present a bootstrapping procedure that allows not only estimation of an effect onset, but also of a temporal confidence interval around this divergence point. We describe how divergence points can be used to demonstrate timecourse differences between speaker groups or between experimental manipulations, two important issues in evaluating L2 processing accounts. We discuss possible extensions of the bootstrapping procedure, including determining divergence points for individual speakers and correlating them with individual factors like L2 exposure and proficiency. Data and an analysis tutorial are available at https://osf.io/exbmk/. KW - divergence point analyses KW - non-parametric approaches KW - bootstrapping KW - visual world eye-tracking KW - bilingualism Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728920000607 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 24 IS - 5 SP - 833 EP - 841 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - Cambridge ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pañeda, Claudia A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Vares, Elena A1 - Veríssimo, João Marques A1 - Felser, Claudia T1 - Island effects in Spanish comprehension JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - A growing body of experimental syntactic research has revealed substantial variation in the magnitude of island effects, not only across languages but also across different grammatical constructions. Adopting a well-established experimental design, the present study examines island effects in Spanish using a speeded acceptability judgment task. To quantify variation across grammatical constructions, we tested extraction from four different types of structure (subjects, complex noun phrases, adjuncts and interrogative clauses). The results of Bayesian mixed effects modelling showed that the size of island effects varied between constructions, such that there was clear evidence of subject, adjunct and interrogative island effects, but not of complex noun phrase island effects. We also failed to find evidence that island effects were modulated by participants' working memory capacity as measured by an operation span task. To account for our results, we suggest that variability in island effects across constructions may be due to the interaction of syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and processing factors, which may affect island types differentially due to their idiosyncratic properties. KW - extraction islands KW - Spanish KW - reading comprehension KW - working memory KW - sentence processing Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.1058 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 5 IS - 1 PB - Open Library of Humanities CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Paape, Dario A1 - Avetisyan, Serine A1 - Lago, Sol A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Modeling misretrieval and feature substitution in agreement attraction BT - a computational evaluation JF - Cognitive science N2 - We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better accounted for by an encoding-based model of agreement attraction, compared to a retrieval-based model. A novel methodological contribution of our study is the use of comprehension questions with open-ended responses, so that both misinterpretation of the number feature of the subject phrase and misassignment of the thematic subject role of the verb can be investigated at the same time. We find evidence for both types of misinterpretation in our study, sometimes in the same trial. However, the specific error patterns in our data are not fully consistent with any previously proposed model. KW - Agreement attraction KW - Eastern Armenian KW - Self-paced reading KW - Computational modeling Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13019 SN - 0364-0213 SN - 1551-6709 VL - 45 IS - 8 PB - Wiley-Blackwell CY - Malden, Mass. 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 -