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  -