Gender attraction in sentence comprehension

Gonzalez Alonso, J., Cunnings, I. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5318-0186, Fujita, H., Miller, D. and Rothman, J. (2021) Gender attraction in sentence comprehension. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6 (1). 20. ISSN 2397-1835 doi: 10.5334/gjgl.1300

Abstract/Summary

Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were rusty), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of agreement attraction in comprehension have largely been limited to subject-verb number agreement, primarily in English, and while attraction in other agreement phenomena such as gender has been investigated in production, very few studies have focused on gender attraction in comprehension. We conducted five experiments investigating noun-adjective gender agreement during comprehension in Spanish. Our results indicate attraction effects during online sentence processing that are consistent with approaches ascribing attraction to interference during memory retrieval, rather than to a faulty representation of agreement features. We interpret our findings as consistent with the predictions of cue-based parsing.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/96364
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Publisher	Ubiquity Press
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