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Inflectional Paradigm for Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter German Nouns in the Nominative, Accusative, and Dative Cases
Source publication
In three experiments, we investigated whether the production of subject-verb number agreement is affected by the phonological realization of grammatical information. Speakers repeated and completed German or Dutch noun phrases along the lines of The position against the demonstrations. We varied the number of the subject noun (position) and the loc...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... German, the case of a noun with a definite article is specified by both the definite article and the inflectional ending on the noun. Table 1 gives the inflectional paradigm for German nouns in the masculine, feminine, and neuter genders. ...
Context 2
... related manipulation affected the morphophono- logical ambiguity of case in the head noun phrase. Al- though subject nouns are always nominative, the ambi- guity of nominative case specification depends on gender (see Table 1). Subject nouns with feminine and neuter genders are ambiguous between nominative and accusative, whereas singular masculine subject nouns are clearly nominative. ...
Context 3
... determiner for masculine nouns in the nominative singular (der) is unambiguous. But the corre- sponding determiners for feminine and neuter nouns (die, das) are ambiguous between nominative and accusative singular (see Table 1). The unambiguous condition was represented by 15 items with mas- culine head nouns, and the ambiguous condition was represented by 17 items, 11 with feminine head nouns and 6 with neuter head nouns. ...
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Citations
... Grammatical agreement refers to the relationship between words, phrases, and sentences which are compatible by virtue of morphological inflections carried by at least one constituent, such that the morpho/phonological features of one constituent, e.g., the verb, are related to morpho/phonological features of another constituent, e.g., the noun (Corbett, 2006, Hartsuiker et al., 2003. Grammatical agreement, particularly subject-verb agreement (SVA) is pervasive across most of the world's languages (Acuña-Fariña 2009) and generally encodes information related to person (1) number (2), gender (3) and case (4). ...
... As can be seen, SVA can involve number, person, gender, and case together and can represent the same information on different constituents (e.g., determiners, nouns, verbs). In English, agreement is established in almost every sentence (Hartsuiker et al. 2003) and is one of the strongest grammatical cues that language users rely on for comprehension during continuous speech, making agreement one of the strongest cues with high validity in sentence processing (MacWhinney et al. 1984;Li & MacWhinney 2013). There are, however, competing theoretical and processing accounts of SVA in the language sciences. ...
We present experimental evidence suggesting that frequency and literacy predict online processing and comprehension of subject-verb agreement constructions by adult native speakers of English. We measured participants’ eye fixations, reaction times, and response accuracy in a forced-choice task using audio-visual eye-tracking paradigm. Participants completed a battery of tasks, inc. the Literacy Rating Scale (Tarone et al., Literacy and Second Language Oracy-Oxford Applied Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2013), Agreement Judgement Task (e.g., Veenstra et al., Frontiers in Psychology 5:783, 2014). The AJT involved matching an auditorily presented subject phrase to one of two images of easily distinguishable colours presented on a computer screen (e.g., stars, circles). Participants heard 42 test sentences, counterbalanced across the three types: Type 1 (e.g., ‘The stars with the circles are blue’), Type 2 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles is blue’) and Type 3 (e.g., ‘The star with the circles are blue’*. Type 1 and Type 2 constructions are considerably more frequent in writing than in speech (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998) with Type 2 producing more attraction errors (Bock et al., Cognitive Psychology 43:83–128, 2001; Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].). Data were analysed with linear mixed effects models and generalised additive models. Results show lower literacy participants took longer to process sentential cues and made more attraction errors. These findings support usage-based research showing frequency and experience effects on online comprehension of canonical and non-canonical constructions (Farmer, T. A., Misyak, J. B., & Christiansen, M. H. (2012). Individual differences in sentence processing. In Cambridge handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 353-364)., Street, Language Sciences 59:192–203, 2017), detection and production of agreement attraction errors (Becker, L., & Dąbrowska, E. (2020). Does experience with written language influence grammaticality intuitions? UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference: University of Birmingham [conference presentation].) and demonstrate how linguistic and attentional processes interact (Tomlin and Myachykov, Attention and salience, Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 2015). They also complement corpus-based studies by providing evidence that native speakers are sensitive to observed distributions (Miller et al., Spontaneous spoken language: Syntax and discourse, Oxford University Press on Demand, 1998).
... Several studies have argued that case syncretism does matter, showing that unambiguous case marking reduces attraction effects in Dutch (Hartsuiker, Antón-Méndez, & Van Zee, 2001), English (J. Nicol & Antón-Méndez, 2009), German (Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, & Kikstra, 2003), and Russian (Cherepovskaia, Reutova, & Slioussar, 2021;Slioussar, 2018). In Slovak, Badecker and Kuminiak (2007) found that gender attraction was only observed when the case syncretism is instantiated on the head noun. ...
... The overt case marking may make items in memory more easily distinguishable. Specifically, case marking on the retrieval target could make the target more distinguishable from the distractors, and consequently reduce interference (Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Nicol and Antón-Méndez, 2009, but cf. Avetisyan et al., 2020). ...
... The authors reported that fewer attraction errors were produced for complex NPs with a singular head that had a prepositional phrase (PP) modifier which was marked for accusative case (such as the letter from him/them), compared to a PP modifier that did not have overt case marking (such as the letter from the editor(s)). A study on German also showed a pattern suggestive of reduced attraction for overt and unambiguous case marking (Hartsuiker et al., 2003). However, the results from a recent study on number agreement attraction effects in Eastern Armenian suggests that case may not play a role (Avetisyan et al., 2020). ...
... Hartsuiker et al. (2003) manipulated number (singular, plural) and case marking (Nominative-Accusative ambiguous, Dative unambiguous) on the PP modifier of a complex NP. This study reported that attraction errors were reduced in the unambiguous conditions (German: Die Stellungnahme zu der/den DAT Demonstration(en), English: The position on the demonstration(s)) compared to the ambiguous conditions (German: Die Stellungnahme gegen die N OM/ACC Demonstration(en), English: The position against the demonstration(s)). ...
The aim of this dissertation was to conduct a larger-scale cross-linguistic empirical investigation of similarity-based interference effects in sentence comprehension. Interference studies can offer valuable insights into the mechanisms that are involved in long-distance dependency completion. Many studies have investigated similarity-based interference effects, showing that syntactic and semantic information are employed during long-distance dependency formation (e.g., Arnett & Wagers, 2017; Cunnings & Sturt, 2018; Van Dyke, 2007, Van Dyke & Lewis, 2003; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011). Nevertheless, there are some important open questions in the interference literature that are critical to our understanding of the constraints involved in dependency resolution. The first research question concerns the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in online sentence comprehension. Only few interference studies have investigated this question, and, to date, there is not enough data to draw conclusions with regard to their time course (Van Dyke, 2007; Van Dyke & McElree, 2011). Our first cross-linguistic study explores the relative timing of syntactic and semantic interference in two eye-tracking reading experiments that implement the study design used in Van Dyke (2007). The first experiment tests English sentences. The second, larger-sample experiment investigates the two interference types in German. Overall, the data suggest that syntactic and semantic interference can arise simultaneously during retrieval. The second research question concerns a special case of semantic interference: We investigate whether cue-based retrieval interference can be caused by semantically similar items which are not embedded in a syntactic structure. This second interference study builds on a landmark study by Van Dyke & McElree (2006). The study design used in their study is unique in that it is able to pin down the source of interference as a consequence of cue overload during retrieval, when semantic retrieval cues do not uniquely match the retrieval target. Unlike most other interference studies, this design is able to rule out encoding interference as an alternative explanation. Encoding accounts postulate that it is not cue overload at the retrieval site but the erroneous encoding of similar linguistic items in memory that leads to interference (Lewandowsky et al., 2008; Oberauer & Kliegl, 2006). While Van Dyke & McElree (2006) reported cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors, the evidence for this effect was weak. A subsequent study did not show interference of this type (Van Dyke et al., 2014). Given these inconclusive findings, further research is necessary to investigate semantic cue-based retrieval interference. The second study in this dissertation provides a larger-scale cross-linguistic investigation of cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external items. Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German, and Russian tested cue-based interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies. This study further extends the previous research by investigating interference in each language under varying task demands (Logačev & Vasishth, 2016; Swets et al., 2008). Overall, we see some very modest support for proactive cue-based retrieval interference in English. Unexpectedly, this was observed only under a low task demand. In German and Russian, there is some evidence against the interference effect. It is possible that interference is attenuated in languages with richer case marking. In sum, the cross-linguistic experiments on the time course of syntactic and semantic interference from sentence-internal distractors support existing evidence of syntactic and semantic interference during sentence comprehension. Our data further show that both types of interference effects can arise simultaneously. Our cross-linguistic experiments investigating semantic cue-based retrieval interference from sentence-external distractors suggest that this type of interference may arise only in specific linguistic contexts.
... (Bock & Miller, 1991) Speech errors like that in (1) have been documented across languages in both experimental contexts and natural speech (e.g. Bock & Cutting, 1992;Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Bock & Miller, 1991;Den Dikken, 2001;Francis, 1986;Franck et al., 2002;Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Haskell et al., 2010;Pfau, 2009;Slioussar, 2018;Vigliocco et al., 1996), and grammatical facilitation occurs for attraction errors in comprehension tasks (e.g. Clifton et al., 1999;Dillon et al., 2013;Kaan, 2002;Lago et al., 2015;Pearlmutter et al., 1999;Shen et al., 2013;Tanner et al., 2014;Wagers et al., 2009). ...
... The contrast between plural and singular interference has been demonstrated across languages (e.g. Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Vigliocco et al., 1996;inter-alia) and ...
... Instead, the generator must use other retrieval cues such as category, case, or position-based features (see Hartsuiker et al., 2003 for evidence from German that case plays a role during number agreement formulation). Errors arise when an attractor matches these retrieval cues, which can at times lead to its erroneous retrieval (Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007). ...
Studies of agreement attraction in language production have shown that speakers systematically produce verb agreement errors in the presence of a local noun whose features differ from that of the agreement controller. However, in attraction experiments, these errors only ever occur in a subset of trials. In the present study, we applied a naturalistic scene-description paradigm to investigate how attraction affects the distribution of errors and the time-course of correctly inflected verbs. We conducted our experiment both in the lab and in an unsupervised web-based setting. The results were strikingly similar across the experimental settings for both the error and timing analyses, demonstrating that it is possible to conduct production experiments via the internet with a high level of similarity to those done in the lab. The experiments replicated the basic number attraction effect, though they elicited comparable interference from both singular and plural local nouns, challenging common assumptions about a strong plural markedness effect in attraction. We observed slowdowns before correct verbs that paralleled the distribution of agreement errors, suggesting that the process resulting in attraction can be active even when no error is produced. Our results are easily captured by a model of agreement attraction in which errors arise at the point of computing agreement, rather than reflecting earlier errors made during initial encoding of the subject number.
... May 2022 | Volume 13 | Article 829112 Slioussar et al. Syncretism in Agreement Attraction Attraction effects were observed both in number and in gender agreement across a variety of languages (e.g., Bock and Miller, 1991;Vigliocco et al., 1995Vigliocco et al., , 1996Clifton et al., 1999;Pearlmutter et al., 1999;Vigliocco and Franck, 1999;Franck et al., 2002Franck et al., , 2006Franck et al., , 2008Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Solomon and Pearlmutter, 2004;Eberhard et al., 2005;Badecker and Kuminiak, 2007;Staub, 2009Staub, , 2010Wagers et al., 2009;Dillon et al., 2013;Tanner et al., 2014;Slioussar and Malko, 2016;Slioussar, 2018;Hammerly et al., 2019;Tucker et al., 2021). The phenomenon attracts researchers' attention because agreement is one of the basic grammatical operations that we strive to understand and because attraction effects allowed studying many other important questions. ...
... As we show in more detail below, syncretism was found to affect agreement attraction in several previous production and comprehension studies on different languages (e.g., Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Badecker and Kuminiak, 2007;Slioussar, 2018). However, Avetisyan et al. (2020) did not detect any influence of case marking on number agreement attraction in their comprehension study on Armenian. ...
... As we show in more detail below, the effects of syncretism are better explained within this approach. The role of syncretism for agreement attraction was first tested on the German language (Hartsuiker et al., 2003). German inflects nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns into four cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. ...
Many production and comprehension experiments have studied attraction errors in agreement, primarily in number (e.g., “The key to the cabinets were rusty”). Studies on gender agreement attraction are still sparse, especially in comprehension. We present two self-paced reading experiments on Russian focusing on the role of syncretism in this phenomenon. Russian nouns are inflected for case and number, and some forms have the same inflections (are syncretic). In several experiments on Slovak, it was shown that both head and attractor syncretism play a role for gender agreement in production. We demonstrate for the first time that this is also the case in comprehension. The role of head noun syncretism has not been analyzed in any previous comprehension studies, also for number agreement. We conclude that syncretic forms create uncertainty, which is crucial for agreement disruption. These results are better compatible with retrieval approaches to agreement attraction. We discuss the implications of our findings for the nature of the retrieval cues used to establish morphosyntactic dependencies. The question whether case marking modulates agreement attraction in comprehension has also been addressed in a study on Armenian, and it found no evidence of such influence. We offer an explanation of the conflicting findings from several studies based on the syntactic constructions they used as materials.
... The most studied semantic influence comes from the notional representation of subject's number (e.g., grammatically singular but notionally plural nouns generate more plural verbs than notionally singular nouns; see Bock, Eberhard, & Cutting, 2004;Eberhard, 1999;Haskell & MacDonald, 2003;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996). Second, attraction is stronger for plural attractors than for singular ones (e.g., Eberhard, 1997;Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, & Kikstra, 2003;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). Third, attraction is modulated by the hierarchical position of the attractor, more than by its linear position. ...
Formal theories of grammar and traditional parsing models, insofar as they presuppose a categorical notion of grammar, face the challenge of accounting for gradient effects (sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by explaining gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors, positing a purely categorical core for the language system. We present a new way of accounting for gradience in a self-organized sentence processing (SOSP) model. SOSP generates structures with a continuous range of grammaticality values by assuming a flexible structure-formation system in which the parses are formed even under sub-optimal circumstances by coercing elements to play roles that do not optimally suit them. We focus on islands, a family of syntactic domains out of which movement is generally prohibited. Islands are interesting because, although many linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, experimental studies have revealed gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence for their interpretability. We describe the conceptual framework of SOSP, showing that it largely respects island constraints, but in certain cases, consistent with empirical data, coerces elements that block dependencies into elements that allow them.
... An important difference to the production accounts discussed above is that the Lewis and Vasishth model predicts attraction effects in ungrammatical sentences irrespective of their syntactic structure-any noun, regardless of position and syntactic role can be retrieved instead of the subject as long as it matches sufficiently many retrieval cues. The Lewis and Vasishth model can also explain the increase in attraction error rates when the attractor superficially resembles the sentential subject (Engelmann et al., 2019), for instance, when the attractor's case marking is ambiguous between nominative and the actual case (Avetisyan et al., 2020;Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, & Kikstra, 2003;Slioussar & Malko, 2016). ...
Agreement attraction is a cross‐linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun (“The key to the cabinets were…”). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction as a consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content‐addressable memory. In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single‐trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model.
... But there are certain conditions that elicit agreement errors, which makes subject-verb agreement a useful testbed for studying computations underlying syntactic production. Specifically, in a sentence containing two nouns with different pluralities, the local noun, i.e., the one intervening between the subject and the verb, can "attract" the wrong verb, as in "The key next to the cabinets are…" (see also Badecker & Kuminiak, 2007;Hartsuiker et al., 2003;Lago et al., 2015;Lorimor et al., 2008;Slioussar, 2018, for a replication in languages other than English). This confusion happens much more often with a singular subject and a plural local noun (henceforth referred to as SP sentences) than vice versa (PS sentences). ...
... Moreover, crosslinguistic studies have demonstrated morphonological influences on agreement attraction. For example, Hartsuiker et al. (2003) showed greater agreement attraction in German if the local noun phrase was ambiguous between nominative and accusative, and in Dutch if the subject noun had an ambiguous number determiner (see also Franck et al., 2008;Lorimor et al., 2016;Mirković & MacDonald, 2013). In short, semantic, morphonological and syntactic cues all contribute to the agreement computation, in line with the claim that agreement production is essentially a constraintsatisfaction problem (Engelmann et al., 2019;Haskell & MacDonald, 2003). ...
Agreement attraction, i.e., the production or acceptance of a verb that agrees with a noun other than the subject of the sentence, can be viewed as a process in which conflicting cues activate competing representations. The aftermath of such competition, in terms of cognitive processes, remains unclear. Using a novel referential communication task for eliciting agreement errors and both group-level manipulation of control demands and a detailed analysis of individual differences, we provide converging evidence for the role of monitoring and inhibitory control processes in agreement attraction for singular-subject sentences. We further demonstrate the dependence of producing plural verbs on such processes, suggesting the singular form is the prepotent default form. Collectively, these findings provide a clear demonstration for the role of monitoring and control processes in agreement computations, and more generally syntactic operations in sentence production.
... Several studies have argued that case syncretism does matter, showing that unambiguous case marking reduces attraction effects in Dutch (Hartsuiker, Antón-Méndez, & Van Zee, 2001), English (J. Nicol & Antón-Méndez, 2009), German (Hartsuiker, Schriefers, Bock, & Kikstra, 2003), and Russian (Cherepovskaia, Reutova, & Slioussar, 2021;Slioussar, 2018). In Slovak, Badecker and Kuminiak (2007) found that gender attraction was only observed when the case syncretism is instantiated on the head noun. ...
Previous studies have shown that speakers may find sentences violating subject-verb agreement grammatical when the sentence contains a feature-matching noun phrase. This so-called agreement attraction effect has also been found in genitive possessive structures such as 'the teacher's brother' in Turkish (Lago et al., 2019), which is in contrast with its absence in similar constructions in English (Nicol et al., 2016). This discrepancy has been hypothesized to be a result of the association between genitive case marking and subjecthood in Turkish, but not in English. In the present research, we test an alternative explanation in which Turkish number agreement attraction effects are due to a potential confound in Lago et al.'s experiment, as a result of which subject head nouns were locally ambiguous between the possessive and the accusative case. We hypothesized that this ambiguity may have inhibited the availability of the head noun as an agreement controller as the accusative is a non-subject case in Turkish. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a speeded acceptability judgment experiment and our results suggest that case-ambiguity does not play a role in agreement attraction, and thus lends credibility to the claim that genitive noun phrases may function as attractors in Turkish due to the association between genitive case and subjecthood.
... In production, subject-verb agreement errors sometimes occur when a noun phrase contains a plural modifier: speakers are more likely to accidentally produce a plural verb in sentences like (1b) than (1a), consistent with the idea that the plural modifier "attracts" the verb, misleading agreement computations. These so-called attraction errors are crosslinguistically robust in production, having been attested in languages like English, Spanish ( Vigliocco et al., 1996), Italian ( Vigliocco et al., 1995), French (Franck et al., 2002), Dutch (Hartsuiker et al., 2003), and Russian (Lorimor et al., 2008), among others. ...
The comprehension of subject-verb agreement shows “attraction effects,” which reveal that number computations can be derailed by nouns that are grammatically unlicensed to control agreement with a verb. However, previous results are mixed regarding whether attraction affects the processing of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences alike. In a large-sample eye-tracking replication of Lago et al. (2015), we support this “grammaticality asymmetry” by showing that the reading profiles associated with attraction depend on sentence grammaticality. In ungrammatical sentences, attraction affected both fixation durations and regressive eye-movements at the critical disagreeing verb. Meanwhile, both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences showed effects of the attractor noun number prior to the verb, in the first- and second-pass reading of the subject phrase. This contrast suggests that attraction effects in comprehension have at least two different sources: the first reflects verb-triggered processes that operate mainly in ungrammatical sentences. The second source reflects difficulties in the encoding of the subject phrase, which disturb comprehension in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
