Error-Driven Retrieval in Agreement Attraction Rarely Leads to Misinterpretation.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Subject-verb agreement processing involves predicting verb number and controller retrieval.
• Agreement attraction, an error in this process, occurs when a noun interferes with agreement, leading to violations like 'The bed by the lamps were...'.
• This phenomenon is attributed to similarity-based interference during error-driven retrieval.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if agreement attraction alters sentence structural and thematic representations.
• To determine if comprehenders misinterpret the 'attractor' noun as the thematic subject.
• To assess the impact of error-driven retrieval on structural reanalysis during agreement attraction.

Main Methods:

• A novel dual-task paradigm combining self-paced reading and speeded forced-choice.
• Participants read sentence fragments and completed them by choosing adjectives compatible with either the subject or the attractor noun.
• Analysis of reading times and interpretive choices to detect structural reanalysis.

Main Results:

• The expected agreement attraction effect was observed in self-paced reading data.
• Interpretive errors, indicating structural reanalysis, occurred only on a small subset of attraction trials.
• Agreement checking in attraction trials rarely matched the thematic relation.

Conclusions:

• Illusory licensing of agreement violations often reflects a low-level, number-focused rechecking process.
• Agreement attraction typically does not impact the sentence's structural representation.
• Error-driven repair processes can lead to globally inconsistent sentence representations with persistent subject-verb mismatches.