Does case marking affect agreement attraction in comprehension?

• Published in: Journal of memory and language Vol. 112; p. 104087
• Main Authors: Avetisyan, Serine, Lago, Sol, Vasishth, Shravan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.06.2020
• Subjects: Attraction; Comprehension; Cue-based retrieval; Eastern Armenian; Subject-verb agreement; Cue-based retrieval; Attraction; Eastern Armenian; Subject-verb agreement; Comprehension; Case
• ISSN: 0749-596X; 1096-0821
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2020.104087

•Subject-verb agreement attraction effects are investigated in Armenian.•Three experiments show clear indications of attraction effects.•There is no indication that case marking attenuates attraction effects.•Case and number are argued to be used differentially in dependency completion. Previous studies have suggested that distinctive case marking on noun phrases reduces attraction effects in production, i.e., the tendency to produce a verb that agrees with a nonsubject noun. An important open question is whether attraction effects are modulated by case information in sentence comprehension. To address this question, we conducted three attraction experiments in Armenian, a language with a rich and productive case system. The experiments showed clear attraction effects, and they also revealed an overall role of case marking such that participants showed faster response and reading times when the nouns in the sentence had different case. However, we found little indication that distinctive case marking modulated attraction effects. We present a theoretical proposal of how case and number information may be used differentially during agreement licensing in comprehension. More generally, this work sheds light on the nature of the retrieval cues deployed when completing morphosyntactic dependencies.