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Gender Agreement Attraction in Greek Comprehension
Anastasia Paspali1, Theodoros Marinis2,3
1Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Frontiers in Psychology
|May 16, 2020
Summary
Gender agreement attraction occurs in Greek, leading to illusions of grammaticality. This confirms retrieval accounts, suggesting errors happen during memory retrieval, not faulty representations.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Linguistic Theory
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Gender agreement attraction is a linguistic phenomenon where errors in agreement go unnoticed.
- Retrieval and representational accounts offer competing explanations for these errors.
- Understanding attraction in Greek sheds light on cross-linguistic variations in agreement processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate gender agreement attraction in Greek comprehension.
- To examine the role of the agreement target, timing, and phonological matching.
- To assess sensitivity to agreement violations without attractor conflict.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments manipulated sentence grammaticality, attractor value (match/mismatch), and phonological matching.
- Agreement targets included adjectival predicates and object-clitics with feminine or neuter gender heads.
- Data collected through time-course measures, timed, and untimed judgments.
Main Results:
- Gender agreement attraction was observed in all measures for both adjectival predicates and object-clitics.
- Participants predominantly experienced illusions of grammaticality, supporting retrieval accounts.
- Phonological matching did not influence attraction; sensitivity to violations was present without conflict.
Conclusions:
- Retrieval accounts are favored for explaining gender agreement attraction in Greek.
- Phonological similarity does not enhance attraction, contrary to some hypotheses.
- Speakers demonstrate sensitivity to agreement rules, possessing both neuter and feminine gender features.
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