Agreement attraction in grammatical sentences and the role of the task

Anna Laurinavichyute, Titus von der Malsburg

Abstract: This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that makepredictions for sentences like “The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...”.Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb insentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interferenceaccounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with singulardistractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlierresearch, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here isalmost perfectly inconclusive. An explanation may be that both effects occursimultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conductedthree single-trial self-paced reading experiments (N1= 4,296,N2= 3,920,N3= 3,559) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitoryinterference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreementattraction but none for inhibitory interference. Experiment 4 (N4= 3,535) testedthe role of the expected task by preparing participants for a comprehensionquestion (vs. acceptability judgment in Experiments 1–3). It showed neitheragreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstratethat agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlierresearch – but also that these effects crucially depend on the task. This findingexplains inconsistent results in prior research and it creates challenges, andopportunities, for future research.