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Interference in Processing Agreement: The Impact of Grammatical Cues
Maria Garraffa1, Alberto Di Domenico2
1School of ECLS-Education, Communication and Language Sciences, NewCastle University, King George VI Building, Queen Victoria Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK. maria.garraffa@ncl.ac.uk.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|February 14, 2015
Summary
This study reveals that grammatical agreement is disrupted by intervening words, especially in Italian. Interference depends on the intervener
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Linguistic Theory
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Grammatical agreement, a covariation in word form, is essential for sentence structure.
- Interference effects in agreement highlight the complexities of language processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how intervening elements affect grammatical agreement during language production and comprehension in Italian.
- To determine the factors influencing agreement interference, including markedness and grammatical role.
Main Methods:
- Experimental studies in Italian focusing on both language production and comprehension tasks.
- Analysis of interference likelihood and error patterns when elements intervene between subject and verb.
Main Results:
- Interference is more frequent when prepositional modifiers intervene than object pronouns.
- Subject agreement with intervening object pronouns leads to errors and slower comprehension.
- Agreement processing is sensitive to both the intervener's markedness and its structural position.
Conclusions:
- Grammatical agreement is a dynamic process influenced by structural position and intervener characteristics.
- A unified model of agreement in production and comprehension involves memory retrieval sensitive to structural positions.
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