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  - 
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  -