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The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study
Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9122017/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35602756 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.829112 |
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author | Slioussar, Natalia Magomedova, Varvara Makarova, Polina |
author_facet | Slioussar, Natalia Magomedova, Varvara Makarova, Polina |
author_sort | Slioussar, Natalia |
collection | PubMed |
description | Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian focusing on the role of syncretism in this phenomenon. Russian nouns are inflected for case and number, and some forms have the same inflections (are syncretic). In several experiments on Slovak, it was shown that both head and attractor syncretism play a role for gender agreement in production. We demonstrate for the first time that this is also the case in comprehension. The role of head noun syncretism has not been analyzed in any previous comprehension studies, also for number agreement. We conclude that syncretic forms create uncertainty, which is crucial for agreement disruption. These results are better compatible with retrieval approaches to agreement attraction. We discuss the implications of our findings for the nature of the retrieval cues used to establish morphosyntactic dependencies. The question whether case marking modulates agreement attraction in comprehension has also been addressed in a study on Armenian, and it found no evidence of such influence. We offer an explanation of the conflicting findings from several studies based on the syntactic constructions they used as materials. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9122017 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-91220172022-05-21 The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study Slioussar, Natalia Magomedova, Varvara Makarova, Polina Front Psychol Psychology Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian focusing on the role of syncretism in this phenomenon. Russian nouns are inflected for case and number, and some forms have the same inflections (are syncretic). In several experiments on Slovak, it was shown that both head and attractor syncretism play a role for gender agreement in production. We demonstrate for the first time that this is also the case in comprehension. The role of head noun syncretism has not been analyzed in any previous comprehension studies, also for number agreement. We conclude that syncretic forms create uncertainty, which is crucial for agreement disruption. These results are better compatible with retrieval approaches to agreement attraction. We discuss the implications of our findings for the nature of the retrieval cues used to establish morphosyntactic dependencies. The question whether case marking modulates agreement attraction in comprehension has also been addressed in a study on Armenian, and it found no evidence of such influence. We offer an explanation of the conflicting findings from several studies based on the syntactic constructions they used as materials. Frontiers Media S.A. 2022-05-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9122017/ /pubmed/35602756 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.829112 Text en Copyright © 2022 Slioussar, Magomedova and Makarova. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Slioussar, Natalia Magomedova, Varvara Makarova, Polina The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title | The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title_full | The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title_fullStr | The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title_full_unstemmed | The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title_short | The Role of Case Syncretism in Agreement Attraction: A Comprehension Study |
title_sort | role of case syncretism in agreement attraction: a comprehension study |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9122017/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35602756 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.829112 |
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