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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...

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Autores principales: Slioussar, Natalia, Magomedova, Varvara, Makarova, Polina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
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.
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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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