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Hierarchical structure and memory mechanisms in agreement attraction
Julie Franck1, Matthew Wagers2
1Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Plos One
|May 20, 2020
Summary
This study reveals how sentence structure impacts grammatical agreement errors, known as attraction. Memory representations are influenced by a noun's syntactic position, affecting error detection during language processing.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Speakers sometimes use verbs that incorrectly agree with sentence elements other than the subject (attractors).
- Comprehenders often miss these agreement errors when the verb matches the attractor.
- Cross-linguistic research indicates sentence structure influences attraction errors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between an attractor's structural position and memory representations in attraction.
- To examine how memory influences the detection of agreement errors.
Main Methods:
- Utilized jabberwocky (nonsense) materials to isolate structural agreement processing from semantic influences.
- Employed a Speed-Accuracy Trade-off (SAT) design combined with a memory probe recognition task.
- Measured retrieval speed and accuracy for subjects and attractors in sentences prone to attraction errors.
Main Results:
- Confirmed attraction errors occur in jabberwocky sentences, mirroring natural language patterns and demonstrating structural dependency.
- Demonstrated a strong correlation between attraction error patterns and memory retrieval parameters.
- Found that noun accessibility in memory is linked to syntactic position, with subjects remaining in attentional focus.
Conclusions:
- Sentence memory architecture is content-addressable, with accessibility determined by syntactic position.
- Attraction errors are modulated by how sentence elements are stored and accessed in memory.
- Language processing relies on memory systems sensitive to hierarchical syntactic structure.
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