scholarly journals Straight from the horse's mouth: agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Martina Gračanin-Yuksek ◽  
Duygu Fatma Şafak ◽  
Orhan Demir ◽  
Bilal Kırkıcı ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Retrieval Mechanism ◽  
Attraction Effects ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Attraction Errors ◽  
Turkish German

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.

scholarly journals Straight from the horse’s mouth

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Martina Gračanin-Yuksek ◽  
Duygu Fatma Şafak ◽  
Orhan Demir ◽  
Bilal Kırkıcı ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Retrieval Mechanism ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Attraction Errors ◽  
Turkish German

Abstract 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.

Object attraction effects during subject-verb agreement in Persian

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 742-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aazam Feiz ◽  
Wind Cowles
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Production ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Attraction Effects ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Attraction Errors

Subject-verb agreement provides insight into how grammatical and semantic features interact during sentence production, and prior studies have found attraction errors when an intervening local noun is grammatically part of the subject. Two major types of theories have emerged from these studies: control based and competition-based. The current study used an subject-object-verb language with optional subject-verb agreement, Persian, to test the competition-based hypothesis that intervening object nouns may also cause attraction effects, even though objects are not part of the syntactic relationship between the subject and verb. Our results, which did not require speakers to make grammatical errors, show that objects can be attractors for agreement, but this effect appears to be dependent on the type of plural marker on the object. These results support competition-based theories of agreement production, in which agreement may be influenced by attractors that are outside the scope of the subject-verb relationship.

scholarly journals Gradience in subject–verb number agreement: Can bilinguals tune in?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1523-1551
Author(s):  
Anna Jessen ◽  
Lara Schwarz ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Verb Number

AbstractThis study investigates native German speakers’ and bilingual Turkish/German speakers’ sensitivity to constraints on verbal agreement with pseudo-partitive subjects such as eine Packung Tabletten (“a pack of pills”). Although number agreement with the first noun phrase (headed by a container noun) is considered to be the norm, agreement with the second (containee) noun phrase is also possible. We combined scalar acceptability ratings with a stochastic constraint-based grammatical framework to model the relative strength of the constraints that determine speakers’ agreement preferences and subsequently tested whether these models could correctly predict speakers’ verb choices in a production task. For both participant groups, number match between the container noun phrase and the verb was the strongest determinant of both acceptability and production choices. The relative ranking of the constraints that we identified was the same for both groups, and the lack of age-of-acquisition effects suggests that constraints on variable subject–verb agreement, and their relative strength, are acquirable by both early and later learners of German. Group differences were seen in the absolute constraint weightings, however, with the bilinguals’ agreement preferences being more strongly influenced by number match with the containee phrase, indicating a comparatively greater reliance on surface-level cues to agreement (such as noun proximity) among the bilingual group.

scholarly journals Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Diego Shalom ◽  
Mariano Sigman ◽  
Ellen Lau ◽  
Colin Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Attraction Effects

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.

scholarly journals Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

Research on the production of subject-verb agreement has focused on the features of the subject rather than the larger construction in which subject-verb agreement is produced or how the conceptual relationship between subjects and predicates may interact in affecting subject-verb agreement patterns. This corpus study describes subject-verb number agreement mismatch in English copular constructions which take the frame of (SEMANTICALLY LIGHT) N + [REL] + COP + (SPECIFIC) PRED NOM, where the copula reflects the grammatical number of the predicate. Results suggest that speakers make use of conceptual information from the entire construction, and not just the subject, when formulating agreement morphology.

scholarly journals THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT AMONG SWEDISH AND CHINESE SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie N. Jackson ◽  
Elizabeth Mormer ◽  
Laurel Brehm
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
L2 Proficiency ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Second Language Speakers ◽  
L2 Production ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
L1 English

AbstractThis study uses a sentence completion task with Swedish and Chinese L2 English speakers to investigate how L1 morphosyntax and L2 proficiency influence L2 English subject-verb agreement production. Chinese has limited nominal and verbal number morphology, while Swedish has robust noun phrase (NP) morphology but does not number-mark verbs. Results showed that like L1 English speakers, both L2 groups used grammatical and conceptual number to produce subject-verb agreement. However, only L1 Chinese speakers—and less-proficient speakers in both L2 groups—were similarly influenced by grammatical and conceptual number when producing the subject NP. These findings demonstrate how L2 proficiency, perhaps combined with cross-linguistic differences, influence L2 production and underscore that encoding of noun and verb number are not independent.

scholarly journals Comprehending anaphoric presuppositions involves memory retrieval too

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherry Yong Chen ◽  
E. Matthew Husband
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Diffusion Model ◽  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
Drift Diffusion Model ◽  
Drift Diffusion ◽  
Retrieval Processes ◽  
Retrieval Mechanism ◽  
Presupposition Triggers

We investigate the memory retrieval mechanism that underlies the real-time comprehension of anaphoric presupposition triggers. Using the Drift Diffusion Model, we offer a new experimental argument for the anaphoric view of presuppositions with evidence from the memory retrieval processes associated with the trigger too. We show that the memory representation of the antecedent content that satisfies the presupposition is retrieved via a direct access mechanism, suggesting that anaphoric triggers such as too share the same processing signature of many anaphoric expressions, such as pronouns and VP ellipses.

scholarly journals Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractor

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Utku Turk ◽  
Pavel Logacev
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Feature Matching ◽  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Head Noun ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Attraction Effects ◽  
Potential Confound ◽  
Acceptability Judgment ◽  
Genitive Case

Previous studies have shown that speakers may find sentences violating subject-verb agreement grammatical when the sentence contains a feature-matching noun phrase. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive possessive structures such as 'the teacher's brother' in Turkish (Lago et al., 2019), which is in contrast with its absence in similar constructions in English (Nicol et al., 2016). This discrepancy has been hypothesized to be a result of the association between genitive case marking and subjecthood in Turkish, but not in English. In the present research, we test an alternative explanation in which Turkish number agreement attraction effects are due to a potential confound in Lago et al.'s experiment, as a result of which subject head nouns were locally ambiguous between the possessive and the accusative case. We hypothesized that this ambiguity may have inhibited the availability of the head noun as an agreement controller as the accusative is a non-subject case in Turkish. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a speeded acceptability judgment experiment and our results suggest that case-ambiguity does not play a role in agreement attraction, and thus lends credibility to the claim that genitive noun phrases may function as attractors in Turkish due to the association between genitive case and subjecthood.

Constraints on subject-verb agreement marking in Turkish-German bilingual speakers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serkan Uygun ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
General Preference ◽  
Advanced Proficiency ◽  
The One ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Turkish German

Abstract Turkish 3rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number. Following earlier findings which indicate that Turkish heritage speakers (HS) accept overt plural marking more readily compared to monolingually raised Turkish speakers, the present study investigates to what extent bilingual speakers are sensitive to grammatical, surface-level and semantic constraints on Turkish plural agreement marking. A scalar acceptability judgement task was carried out with non-bilingual Turkish speakers residing in Turkey and Turkish-German bilinguals residing in Germany. Our experimental design involved manipulating both subject animacy and subject position. Participants’ judgement patterns confirmed Turkish speakers’ general preference for unmarked verb forms, which was modulated both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between lower proficiency HS on the one hand, and monolinguals and advanced proficiency HS on the other, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between different types of constraint on number agreement marking is affected by heritage language conditions. We found no evidence for simplification or optionality reduction in the lower proficiency HS’ judgements, however. We innovate on previous research by using Gradient Symbolic Computation modelling to capture between-group differences in the relative weightings of the constraints under investigation.

Agreement processing and attraction errors in aging: evidence from subject-verb agreement in German

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 672-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Reifegerste ◽  
Franziska Hauer ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Attraction Errors
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