EXPRESS: Misretrieval but not misrepresentation: A feature misbinding account of post-interpretive effects in number attraction.

Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs but no processing cost for grammatical verbs (Tanner et al., 2014; Wagers et al., 2009). While this has favored cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband (2016) offered offline evidence suggesting comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty NP representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real-time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e. no number cue from verb). Although no on-line evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence RSVP experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband (2016), suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.

Agreement Attraction in Turkish: The Case of Genitive Attractor

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.

The Reading Signatures of Agreement Attraction

The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.

An ERP Study on Attraction Effects in Advanced L2 Learners

In English, the rule of agreement is quite simple: verbs must agree with their subject head nouns in terms of number features. Despite this simplicity, agreement processing is always interrupted when the subject phrase of the sentence “The key to the cabinets is on the table,” contains two nouns with a mismatch in number features commonly known as attraction effects. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether late advanced second language (L2) learners can acquire native-like sensitivity of attraction effects. The results revealed that L2 learners showed ERP patterns qualitatively similar to native English speakers: ungrammatical verbs following singular attractors elicited a P600 effect relative to their grammatical counterparts, whereas this positivity was replaced by an N400 effect when plural attractors intervened between the subject head nouns and the verbs. Of particular interest, given that, compared to native speakers, the amplitude of the P600 effect elicited by L2 learners was smaller, there was a quantitative difference between native speakers and L2 learners. We proposed that these two ERP components represented the two processing routes of agreement: the P600 effect indexed a full, combinatorial process, which parsed morphosyntactic features between agreement controllers and targets, whereas the N400 effect indexed a shallow, heuristic process, which evaluated lexical associations between agreeing elements. Moreover, similar to native speakers, advanced L2 learners showed an asymmetrical pattern of attraction effects, in that plural attractors were interfered with ungrammaticality at disagreeing verbs, but they did not cause any difficulties in processing grammatical sentences at agreeing verbs. The overall results suggested that compared to native processing, L2 processing of complex agreement with attractor interference was shallower and therefore late advanced L2 learners could not achieve native-like attraction effects.

Number attraction in verb and anaphor production: narrowing a production–comprehension contrast

Although reflexive–antecedent agreement shows little susceptibility to number attraction in comprehension, prior production research using the preamble-completion paradigm has demonstrated attraction for both verbs and anaphora. In four production experiments, we compared number attraction effects on subject–verb and reflexive–antecedent agreement using a novel scene-description task in addition to a more traditional preamble elicitation paradigm. While the results from the preamble task align with prior findings, the more naturalistic scene description task produced the same contrast observed in comprehension, with robust verb attraction but minimal anaphor attraction. In addition to analyzing agreement error distributions, we also analyzed the production time-course of participant responses, finding timing effects that pattern with error distributions, even when no error is present. The results suggest that production agreement processes show similar profiles to comprehension processes. We discuss potential sources of variable susceptibility to agreement attraction, suggesting that differences may arise from the time-course of information processing across tasks and linguistic dependencies.

Attraction error and speech timing profiles in in-lab and web-based production experiments

Until recently, most web-based psycholinguistic experiments have focused on simple responses such as button presses or typed text. In this paper, we compare two sentence production experiments carried out in the lab and in an unsupervised web-based setting in order to test the robustness of error patterns and speech timing effects in web-based experimental settings. The open-ended spoken responses generated in this task could elicit more variable and noisier recordings when conducted outside a controlled lab environment. The experiments investigate patterns of well-documented attraction effects in the production of subject–verb agreement, examining error rates as well as speech timing effects in correctly produced sentences. In both the error and timing analyses, the results are strikingly similar across the experimental settings. Furthermore, the two experiments challenge common assumptions about a strong plural markedness effect in agreement attraction. Through this replication and comparison, we have found that we can do production experiments via the internet with a high level of similarity to those done in the lab. These results will allow for future production research to be conducted online, which will provide more flexibility and efficiency to this type of experimentation.

Gaze-dependent evidence accumulation predicts multi-alternative risky choice behaviour

Choices are influenced by gaze allocation during deliberation, so that fixating an alternative longer leads to increased probability of choosing it. Gaze-dependent evidence accumulation provides a parsimonious account of choices, response times and gaze-behaviour in many simple decision scenarios. Here, we test whether this framework can also predict more complex context-dependent patterns of choice in a three-alternative risky choice task, where choices and eye movements were subject to attraction and compromise effects. Choices were best described by a gaze-dependent evidence accumulation model, where subjective values of alternatives are discounted while not fixated. Finally, we performed a systematic search over a large model space, allowing us to evaluate the relative contribution of different forms of gaze-dependence and additional mechanisms previously not considered by gaze-dependent accumulation models. Gaze-dependence remained the most important mechanism, but participants with strong attraction effects employed an additional similarity-dependent inhibition mechanism found in other models of multi-alternative multi-attribute choice.

Attraction Effects for Verbal Gender and Number Are Similar but Not Identical: Self-Paced Reading Evidence From Modern Standard Arabic

Previous work on the comprehension of agreement has shown that incorrectly inflected verbs do not trigger responses typically seen with fully ungrammatical verbs when the preceding sentential context furnishes a possibly matching distractor noun (i.e., agreement attraction). We report eight studies, three being direct replications, designed to assess the degree of similarity of these errors in the comprehension of subject-verb agreement along the dimensions of grammatical gender and number in Modern Standard Arabic. A meta-analysis of the results demonstrate the presence of agreement attraction effects in reading comprehension for gender and number on verbs. Moreover, the meta-analysis demonstrates that these two features do not behave identically: gender effects are larger and occur later relative to number attraction effects. These results challenge models of agreement that predict agreement features to be equipotent and show that real-time models of agreement require modifications in the form of cue-weighting in order to account for these differential results.

Processing agreement in Hindi: When agreement feeds attraction

Previous studies have demonstrated robust agreement attraction effects in subject-verb agreement languages. It is an open question whether such attraction effects extend to languages whose agreement systems differ from this prototypical agreement pattern. To address this question, we conducted four forced-choice completion experiments investigating agreement processing in Hindi. Hindi has a mixed-agreement system, where subject-verb agreement and object-verb agreement occur in complementary structural contexts. We observed clear attraction effects in both subject and object agreement contexts. But we found little evidence that the distractor NP’s role, case or syntactic prominence modulated attraction. Rather, attraction occurred when the distractor was itself an agreement controller. We propose a Controller Coding account where Hindi speakers actively identify whether an NP is an agreement controller and encode this information in memory, with agreement interference arising primarily when multiple NPs are encoded as agreement controllers.

Examination of an averaging method for estimating repulsion and attraction interactions in moving groups

Groups of animals coordinate remarkable, coherent, movement patterns during periods of collective motion. Such movement patterns include the toroidal mills seen in fish shoals, highly aligned parallel motion like that of flocks of migrating birds, and the swarming of insects. Since the 1970’s a wide range of collective motion models have been studied that prescribe rules of interaction between individuals, and that are capable of generating emergent patterns that are visually similar to those seen in real animal group. This does not necessarily mean that real animals apply exactly the same interactions as those prescribed in models. In more recent work, researchers have sought to infer the rules of interaction of real animals directly from tracking data, by using a number of techniques, including averaging methods. In one of the simplest formulations, the averaging methods determine the mean changes in the components of the velocity of an individual over time as a function of the relative coordinates of group mates. The averaging methods can also be used to estimate other closely related quantities including the mean relative direction of motion of group mates as a function of their relative coordinates. Since these methods for extracting interaction rules and related quantities from trajectory data are relatively new, the accuracy of these methods has had limited inspection. In this paper, we examine the ability of an averaging method to reveal prescribed rules of interaction from data generated by two individual based models for collective motion. Our work suggests that an averaging method can capture the qualitative features of underlying interactions from trajectory data alone, including repulsion and attraction effects evident in changes in speed and direction of motion, and the presence of a blind zone. However, our work also illustrates that the output from a simple averaging method can be affected by emergent group level patterns of movement, and the sizes of the regions over which repulsion and attraction effects are apparent can be distorted depending on how individuals combine interactions with multiple group mates.