Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?
- 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.
Author details: | Serine Avetisyan, Sol LagoORCiD, Shravan VasishthORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087 |
ISSN: | 0749-596X |
ISSN: | 1096-0821 |
Title of parent work (English): | Journal of memory and language |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Place of publishing: | San Diego |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2020/02/14 |
Publication year: | 2020 |
Release date: | 2023/04/19 |
Tag: | Case; Eastern Armenian; attraction; comprehension; cue-based; retrieval; subject-verb agreement |
Volume: | 112 |
Article number: | 104087 |
Number of pages: | 18 |
Funding institution: | University of Potsdam; Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate (EMJD) Fellowship; [2012-0025-EM II-EMJD] |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik | |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Hybrid Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |