Task-dependency and structure-dependency in number interference effects in sentence comprehension

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Formal Syntax
• Experimental Linguistics

Background:

• Speakers sometimes produce verbs that incorrectly agree with plural objects in object relative clauses (object attraction).
• This phenomenon is linked to formal syntactic concepts like intervention, intermediate traces, and c-command.
• Understanding these mechanisms in sentence comprehension is crucial for a complete model of language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate number mismatch effects in the comprehension of object dependencies (A'-dependencies, relative clauses, questions) in French.
• To determine if syntactic representations used in comprehension align with those identified in sentence production.
• To explore how different parsing tasks (self-paced reading vs. grammaticality judgment) reveal distinct processing mechanisms.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using French grammatical structures with agreement errors.
• Experiment 1: Self-paced reading task to measure reading times on sentences with number mismatch.
• Experiments 2 & 3: On-line grammaticality judgment tasks to assess response times to ungrammatical sentences.

Main Results:

• Self-paced reading showed an enhancing effect of number mismatch, with faster reading times for plural objects.
• Grammaticality judgments revealed an interference effect (attraction), with slower response times for plural objects.
• Grammaticality judgments demonstrated stronger attraction from c-commanding interveners than preceding ones.

Conclusions:

• Syntactic computations in language performance (production and comprehension) utilize shared syntactic representations.
• Different tasks probe distinct parsing processes: self-paced reading reflects subject intervention in A'-dependency building.
• Grammaticality judgment reflects object intervention in subject-verb agreement, mirroring structure-dependent attraction effects seen in production.