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Gender attraction in sentence comprehension

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  • JORGE GONZÁLEZ ALONSO
  • IAN CUNNINGS
  • HIROKI FUJITA
  • DAVID MILLER
  • JASON ROTHMAN
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Article number20
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>18/02/2021
<mark>Journal</mark>Glossa
Issue number1
Volume6
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

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.

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Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s).