Agreement and the subject of confusion

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Agreement and the subject of confusion

• Ellen Lau
• Matt Wagers
• Clare Stroud
• Colin Phillips
• Department of Linguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory

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Agreement attraction

• The roadSG to richesPL arePL paved with t-shirts
  and buttons.

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When does the system fail?
Fallible
Faithful
Wh-dependency formation wh ... gap
(Stowe et al.,
1984) Principle C-sensitive resolution of
cataphora pronoun ... antecedent
(Kazanina et al., 2007)
Principle B-insensitive resolution of
anaphora antecedent ... Pronoun
(Badecker Straub, 2002) Intrusive NPI
licensing licensor ... NPI (Drenhaus
et al., 2004)
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Partial match in retrieval

• To find the other constituent of the dependency,
  use current features to match against previously
  encountered material in memory
• Structurally illicit constituents may partially
  match and consequently intrude upon dependency
  formation

e.g. Lewis Vasishth, 2005
The roadSG to richesPL arePL paved with t-shirts
and buttons.
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Agreement attraction
The roadSG to richesPL arePL paved with t-shirts
and buttons.

• Satisfying number requirement in a
  structure-insensitive way
• Does this lead to structurally insensitive
  analyses of other tightly correlated features?

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Agreement and subject-hood

• Agreement (as a phenomenon)
• (1) In English, agreement tracks subject-hood
• (2) There is a characteristic error
• The road to riches are paved with buttons and
  t-shirts.
• The hypotheses one entertain influence visual
  information search.

• Trollope 1883
• Jespersen 1924
• Strang 1966
• Francis 1986
• Bock Miller 1991, et seq.
• Den Dikken 2001
• Eberhard, Cutting Bock 2005

Kimball Aissen 1971 Kayne 1989 Clifton, Deevy,
Frazier 1999 Franck et al. 2006
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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Comprehenders fail to notice agreement errors in
  exactly the contexts where they produce them
• Off-line acceptability Nicol, Forster Veres
  (1997)Reading times Pearlmutter, Garnsey, Bock
  (1999)

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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Comprehenders fail to notice agreement errors in
  exactly the contexts where they produce them

The phone by the toilet was out of order
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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Comprehenders fail to notice agreement errors in
  exactly the contexts where they produce them

The phone by the toilet was out of order
toilet were out of order
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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Comprehenders fail to notice agreement errors in
  exactly the contexts where they produce them

The phone by the toilet was out of order
toilet were out of order
toilets were out of order
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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• How often does it occur?
• RT reduction could be driven by a complete
  absence of disruption on a smaller number of
  trials, or by a partial reduction of disruption
  on a larger number of trials

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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Interference not observed in grammatical
  sentences--when features on head match features
  on verb

The key to the cabinet was on the table The key
to the cabinets was on the table
verb
Wagers, Lau Phillips, submitted
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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Mechanism for attraction in comprehension has to
  invoke match between features of verb and those
  contained within the subject projection
• Retrieval triggered by error detection
• The phone by the toilets were .

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Agreement attraction in comprehension

• Retrospectively forming relations are liable to
  intrusion of structurally-illicit constituents
• Van Dyke Lewis (2003), Van Dyke McElree
  (2006)
• Modeled for agreement Badecker Lewis
  (CUNY2007), Konieczny, Schimke, Hemforth (2004)

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Agreement and subject-hood

• The phone by the toilets are broken.
• ? a broken phone
• ? broken toilets
• ? (both?)
• Thornton MacDonald (2003)
• Pittman Smyth (2005)
• Barker, Nicol, Garrett (2001)
• Cf. Bock Miller (1991)

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Thornton MacDonald (2003)
PRAISE ? ? THE LETTER FROM THE
PROFESSORS BURN ? ?

• An unambiguous semantic cue to thematic
  subject-hood lessened the intrusion of an
  attractor

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Our study

• Does the retrieval responsible for agreement
  attraction result in (re)assignment of the
  thematic representation?
• The letter from the professors were burned

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Our study

• Does the retrieval responsible for agreement
  attraction result in (re)assignment of the
  thematic representation?
• Inverted pseudoclefts
• The phone by the toilets was what Patrick
  used.

were
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Materials

• The phone by the toilets was/were what
  Patrick
• used phones, toilets
• dialed phones, toilets
• flushed phones, toilets
• embarrassed phones, toilets

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Plausibility ratings
Patrick
n 12
used dialed flushed embarrassed
the phone / toilets.
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On-line study

• Predictions attraction
• The phone by the toilets were what Patrick
  flushed
• If agreement attraction affects assignment of
  thematic subject
• plausibility of embedded head matters
• If agreement attraction is limited to formal
  feature checking
• plausibility of embedded head is still
  irrelevant

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On-line study

• Predictions
• The phone by the toilets was/were what Patrick
• Was v. were Relative reading times at cleft verb

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On-line study

• design 2 x 2 x 2 grammaticality x
  head noun plausibility x embedded noun
  plausibility
• method Moving window self-paced reading
• task Comprehension question unrelated
• to plausibility manipulation
• measure Verb-theme plausibility (Traxler
  Pickering 1996, Phillips 2006)
• participants 64 members of UM community

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Analysis

• Sensitivity to plausibility
• The phone by the toilets was what Patrick
  embarrassed when he
• To maximize chance of finding interaction, only
  include participants who show a main effect of
  head plausibility in the grammatical conditions
• 41 of 64 participants met this criteria

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Plausibility effect
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was/were
The phone by the toilets
what Patrick used
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was/were
The phone by the toilets
what Patrick used



was/were
The phone by the toilets
what Patrick embarrassed
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On-line study

• Predictions
• The phone by the toilets was/were what Patrick
• Was v. were Relative reading times at cleft verb

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Implausible head - Plausible attractor



was/were
The phone by the toilets
what Patrick flushed
Plausible head - Implausible attractor


was/were
The phone by the toilets
what Patrick dialed
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On-line study

• Predictions
• The phone by the toilets was/were what Patrick
• Was v. were Relative reading times at cleft verb

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Summary

• Main effect of head noun plausibility
• Crucially, no interaction with attraction context
  and plausibility of embedded noun
• No indication that attraction leads to thematic
  subject reassignment

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Discussion

• Agreement attraction in comprehension is a
  morphosyntactic illusion, and not a thematic one.
• The mechanism that retrieves information at the
  verb can selectively access the number features.

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Discussion

• Formal feature satisfaction can be implemented
  independently of tightly linked relationships
• Processes can restrict their scope to individual
  features, potentially isolating the impact of
  reanalysis to information in the relevant domain

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Cascading reanalysis

• Christianson et al. (2001)While Anna bathed the
  baby laughed.
• Sturt (2006)The explorers found the South Pole
  was actually impossible to reach.

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Conclusions

• Single features of an item can be retrieved to
  satisfy licensing requirements without forcing
  alignment of tightly linked relationships

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• Thanks!

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Appendix
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Effect size comparison(? / ?pooled )
no attraction
attraction

• Did our participants show attraction?

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n 64
phone toilets
was/dialed
were/dialed
was/flushed
were/flushed
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• Did our participants show attraction?

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Predictions
Molinaro et al. (2007)
The dancer were preparing herself P600 The
dancer were preparing themselves
Our prediction
The dancer with the shoes were preparing
herself The dancer with the shoes were
preparing themselves
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