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CNL Lunch Talks
Matt Wagers & Ellen Lau Thursday Apr 19th 2007, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall The prospect of agreement: detecting and correcting errors in comprehension Much work has looked at the factors underlying so-called attraction errors in the production of subject-verb agreement ('The key to the cabinets are on the table'; Bock & Miller 1991), in which the verb sometimes erroneously takes on the agreement of the intervening noun. Recently parallel attraction effects have also been demonstrated in comprehension, in the form of less disruption for subject-verb agreement violations when these 'attractor' nouns intervene. Are such attraction effects in comprehension indicative of sloppiness in the initial representation of sentential agreement features, or are they rather the result of a reanalysis/recovery mechanism? Does agreement processing in comprehension make use of forward (predictive) mechanisms, backward (retrieval) mechanisms or both? We explore these questions in a set of 6 self-paced-reading sub-experiments which include both the classic PP attractor constructions as well as the RC constructions discussed by Kimball & Aissen (1971) and more recently, Mark Baker ("The girls who the teacher think know the answer..."). |