Agreement attraction in Spanish comprehension

Previous studies have found that English speakers experience attraction effects when comprehending subject-verb agreement, showing eased processing of ungrammatical sentences that contain a syntactically unlicensed but number-matching noun. In four self-paced reading experiments we examine whether attraction effects also occur in Spanish, a language where agreement morphology is richer and functionally more significant. We find that despite having a richer morphology, Spanish speakers show reliable attraction effects in comprehension, and that these effects are strikingly similar to those previously found in English in their magnitude and distributional profile. Further, we use distributional analyses to argue that cue-based memory retrieval is used as an error-driven mechanism in comprehension. We suggest that cross-linguistic similarities in agreement attraction result from speakers deploying repair or error-driven mechanisms uniformly across languages.

先前的研究发现，在理解主谓一致关系时，英语母语者会经历吸引效应，表现为对包含语法上不受许可但数字匹配的名词的不规范句子的处理过程得到简化。在四项自我调节阅读实验中，我们探讨了这种吸引效应是否也存在于西班牙语中，一种形态学更为丰富且在功能上更具重要性的语言。我们发现，尽管西班牙语的形态学更为丰富，但西班牙语母语者在理解过程中仍然表现出可靠的吸引效应，并且这些效应在强度和分布特征上与先前在英语中发现的效应惊人地相似。此外，我们通过分布分析来论证，基于线索的记忆检索被用作理解过程中的错误驱动机制。我们提出，跨语言在一致吸引上的相似性源于说话者在各种语言中普遍采用修正或错误驱动机制。