28.4762, Diss: English; Psycholinguistics: Nathan Eversole: ''Retrieval Processes in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation''

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4762. Fri Nov 10 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4762, Diss: English; Psycholinguistics: Nathan Eversole: ''Retrieval Processes in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation''

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Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2017 12:16:32
From: Nathan Eversole [nathaniel.eversole at gmail.com]
Subject: Retrieval Processes in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation

 
Institution: University of Texas at Arlington 
Program: Department of Linguistics and TESOL 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2017 

Author: Nathan Eversole

Dissertation Title: Retrieval Processes in Subject-Verb Agreement Computation 

Linguistic Field(s): Psycholinguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)


Dissertation Director(s):
Jeffrey Witzel

Dissertation Abstract:

An important question in psycholinguistics is how subject-verb agreement is
computed. One recent proposal is that memory retrieval processes play a key
role in subject-verb agreement during sentence comprehension (Wagers et al.,
2009). This model holds that when an agreeing verb (e.g., praise-s/-∅;
was/were) is encountered, a search is initiated through the memory
representation of the sentence for a noun phrase (NP) with matching agreement
features. When a controlling subject with matching features is available, the
search ends successfully. However, in instances of a mismatch with this
subject, the mechanism may (incorrectly) satisfy the agreement requirements of
the verb with a grammatically inaccessible NP. This dissertation details
several self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments investigating the
factors involved in triggering and modulating these retrieval processes. More
specifically, these experiments examine the verbal cues that initiate
retrieval-based agreement operations as well as their time course and the
grammatical cues that might influence these processes.

One finding that has been taken to support the memory retrieval model is the
“illusion of grammaticality” in sentences like *The musicians that the
reviewer praise so highly won a prestigious award. Under this proposal, this
illusion occurs because the plural relative clause (RC) head (musicians) is
able to satisfy the agreement requirements of the RC verb (praise). This study
looks into the cues that initiate retrieval processes in three self-paced
reading experiments examining whether long-distance agreement attraction is
observed across verbal agreement targets. The results of these experiments
indicate that long-distance attraction effects occur regardless of the form of
the agreeing verb, suggesting that this effect reflects core properties of
subject-verb agreement processing. Second, this study uses eye tracking to
investigate the time course of long-distance agreement attraction in order to
determine whether the attractor element influences early agreement processing
or late processing, after ungrammaticality has been indexed. The results of
this experiment show that these attraction effects are evident across
first-pass reading measures, indicating that these effects relate to the
earliest stages of subject-verb agreement processing. Finally, this
dissertation examines the extent to which agreement attraction is influenced
by structural cues – specifically, whether the structural position of the
attractor NP, either as a syntactic subject or object, affects its viability
as a controller for the verb. The results indicate that agreement attraction
effects are sensitive to structural in- formation on the attractor noun.
Specifically, they appear to show that the agreement processor ignores the
features of an attractor noun which has already been encoded as the subject
for a verb in a previous clause.




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