Bojana Ristic | BCBL – Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastián, Spain
Nicola Molinaro | Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
Simona Mancini | BCBL – Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastián, Spain
Asymmetric number attraction effects have been typically explained via a privative markedness account: plural nouns are more marked than singular ones and thus stronger attractors. However, this account does not explain results from tripartite systems, in which a third number value is available, like paucal. Here we tested whether attraction effects can be driven by specific markedness sub-components, such as frequency/naturalness of use, using Serbian, in which participles can agree with masculine subjects in singular, plural and paucal. We first conducted a naturalness judgment task, finding the following naturalness/frequency pattern: singular,plural<paucal. In a subsequent forced-choice task, we presented participants with preambles containing a singular, a plural or a paucal headnoun (the castle[Sg] /two castles[Pauc] /the castles[Pl]) modified by singular/plural/paucal attractors (with the window[Sg] /with two windows[Pauc] /with the windows[Pl]). Three options were provided to complete the sentence (resembles[Sg] /resemble[Pauc] /resemble[Pl] gothic architecture).Both accuracy and reaction times (RTs) were collected. Accuracy data reflected the naturalness/frequency pattern, with paucal being the strongest attractor, and plural and singular attracting equally. However, reaction times showed a difference between singular and plural, suggesting co-influence of both frequency/naturalness and morphological markedness. We emphasize the necessity of re-defining markedness and testing attraction through different markedness sub-components (i.e. frequency/naturalness) to explain attraction cross-linguistically.
Badecker, W., & Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 561, 65–85.
Badecker, W., & Lewis, R. (2007). A new theory and computational model of working memory in sentence production: Agreement errors as failures of cue-based retrieval. In 20th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference. San Diego, La Jolla, CA: University of California.
Barr, D.J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H.J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 681, 255–278.
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2013). Linear mixed-effect models using Eigen and S4. R package version: 1.0-5. <[URL]>.
Belić, B. (2008). Minor paucal in Serbian. In G. Zybatow, L. Szucsich, U. Junghanns, & R. Meyer (Eds.), Formal description of Slavic Languages: The Fifth Conference, Leipzig 2003 (pp. 258–269). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Bock, K., & Eberhard, K.M. (1993). Meaning, sound and syntax in English number agreement. Language and Cognitive Processes, 81, 57–99.
Bresnan, J. (2001). Explaining morphosyntactic competition. Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory, 111–44.
Browne, W. (1993). 7 Serbo-Croat. The Slavonic Languages, 306–387.
Corbett, G.G. (1983). Hierarchies, targets and controllers: Agreement patterns in slavic.
Corbett, G.G. (2000). Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eberhard, K.M. (1997). The marked effect of number on subject–verb agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 361, 147–164.
Franck, J., Cronel-Ohayon, S., Chillier, L., Frauenfelder, U.H., Hamann, C., Rizzi, L., & Zesiger, P. (2004). Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: A study on French children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 171, 147–180.
Franck, J., Vigliocco, G., & Nicol, J. (2002). Subject-verb agreement errors in French and English: The role of syntactic hierarchy. Language and Cognitive Processes, 171, 371–404.
Franks, S. (1994). Parametric properties of numeral phrases in Slavic. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 121, 597–674.
Greenberg, J.H. (1966). Language universals: With special reference to feature hierarchies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Harrison, A.J. (2009). Production of subject-verb agreement in Slovene and English (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Edinburgh
Hartsuiker, R.J., Antón-Méndez, I., & van Zee, M. (2001). Object attraction in subject-verb agreement construction. Journal of Memory and Language, 451, 546‑572.
Hartsuiker, R.J., Schriefers, H.J., Bock, K., & Kikstra, G.M. (2003). Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement. Memory & Cognition, 311, 1316–1326.
Haspelmath, M. (2006). Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of linguistics, 421, 25–70.
Häussler, J. (2009). The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension (Doctoral dissertation).
Humphreys, K.R., & Bock, K. (2005). Notional number agreement in English. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 121, 689–695.
Kager, R., Qiuwu (马秋武)· Ma, & Jialing (王嘉龄)· Wang. (1999). Optimality theory (Vol. 21). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klajn, I. (2005). Gramatika srpskog jezika. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike i nastavna sredstva.
Levelt, W.J. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition, 141, 41–104. London: Croom Helm.
Mancini, S., Molinaro, N., Rizzi, L., & Carreiras, M. (2011). When persons disagree: an ERP study of Unagreement in Spanish. Psychophysiology, 481, 1361–1371.
McCarthy, J.J. (2011). Doing optimality theory: Applying theory to data.John Wiley & Sons.
Molinaro, N., Carreiras, C., & Duñabeitia, J.A. (2012). Semantic combinatorial processing of non-anomalous expressions. Neuroimage, 591, 3488–3501.
Molinaro, N., Vespignani, F., Canal, P., Fonda, S., & Cacciari, C. (2008). Cloze-probability does not only affect N400 amplitude: The case of complex prepositions. Psychophysiology, 451, 1008–1012.
Perez, A., Molinaro, N., Mancini, S., Barraza, P., & Carreiras, M. (2012). Oscillatory dynamics related to the Unagreement pattern in Spanish. Neuropsychologia, 501, 2584–2597.
Šarić, A. (2014). Numeral induced agreement mismatches in Serbo-Croatian (Unpublished master dissertation). Utrecht University.
Staub, A. (2009). On the interpretation of the number attraction effect: Response time evidence. Journal of Memory and Language, 601, 308–327.
Team, R.C. (2014). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, 20121.
Tucker, M.A., Idrissi, A., & Almeida, D. (2015). Representing number in the real-time processing of agreement: self-paced reading evidence from Arabic. Frontiers in Psychology, 61.
Vigliocco, G., Butterworth, B., & Semenza, C. (1995). Constructing subject-verb agreement in speech: the role of semantic and morphological factors. Journal of Memory and Language, 341, 186‑215.
Vigliocco, G., Butterworth, B., & Garrett, M.F. (1996a). Subject-verb agreement in Spanish and English: Differences in the role of conceptual constraints. Cognition, 611, 261–298.
Vigliocco, G., Hartsuiker, R.J., Jarema, G., & Kolk, H.H.J. (1996b). One or more labels on the bottles? Notional concord in Dutch and French. Language and Cognitive Processes, 111, 407–442.
Wagers, M.W., Lau, E.F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 611, 206–237.
Wechsler, S., & Zlatić, L. (2003). The many faces of agreement. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Zlatić, L. (1997). The structure of the Serbian noun phrase (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas, Austin.
Cited by (8)
Cited by eight other publications
Bleotu, Adina Camelia & Brian Dillon
2024. Romanian (subject-like) DPs attract more than bare nouns: Evidence from speeded continuations. Journal of Memory and Language 134 ► pp. 104445 ff.
Türk, Utku & Pavel Logačev
2024. Agreement attraction in Turkish: the case of genitive attractors. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 39:4 ► pp. 448 ff.
Willer-Gold, Jana
2024. Agreement. In The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics, ► pp. 263 ff.
Tucker, Matthew A., Ali Idrissi & Diogo Almeida
2021. Attraction Effects for Verbal Gender and Number Are Similar but Not Identical: Self-Paced Reading Evidence From Modern Standard Arabic. Frontiers in Psychology 11
2020. Effects of chronological age on native and nonnative sentence processing: Evidence from subject-verb agreement in German. Journal of Memory and Language 111 ► pp. 104083 ff.
Driemel, Imke & Jelena Stojković
2019. How to agree with a QNP. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1
Hammerly, Christopher, Adrian Staub & Brian Dillon
2019. The grammaticality asymmetry in agreement attraction reflects response bias: Experimental and modeling evidence. Cognitive Psychology 110 ► pp. 70 ff.
Lago, Sol, Martina Gračanin-Yuksek, Duygu Fatma Şafak, Orhan Demir, Bilal Kırkıcı & Claudia Felser
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.