Schedule 74. StuTS

The presentation reports on some results of my master thesis which is concerned with the theoretical evaluation of attraction effects in reading times and interpretations of the critical clause's actor as well as its number feature. For this purpose, German subject-verb dependencies of embedded possessive relative clauses have been manipulated in a 2x2 fully-crossed factorial design (grammaticality x attractor verb match). Sentences were presented in a self-paced reading experiment and followed by open-ended comprehension questions, targeting both the interpretation of the number feature and the interpretation of the actor of the embedded relative clause (thematic subject).
Here, only results about the interpretation data will be accounted for and discussed in the context of the two major theories of agreement attraction: the encoding-based accounts and the memory retrieval-based accounts. The former explains attraction effects in terms of false encoding of the number feature on the subject noun; thus predicting number misinterpretations. The latter assumes a cue-based memory retrieval mechanism that is triggered at the verb. Due to interference, there arises the possibility of retrieving the false noun. As a result, thematic misinterpretation arises.
Results, derived from Bayesian inference, revealed the hallmark pattern of attraction effects (ungrammatical, attractor-verb match conditions are more likely to exhibit errors compared to ungrammatical, attractor-verb mismatch conditions) only for number misinterpretations. However, attraction also caused misinterpretations of the actor noun shown by more errors in attractor-verb match conditions compared to mismatch, regardless of grammaticality. This outcome is best explained with the assumptions of a hybrid model or by a post-interpretive process that assumes separate storage caches for nouns and features.

Info

Day: 2023-10-27
Start time: 15:30
Duration: 00:25
Room: Hofburg Raum 2
Track: Neuro- and Psycholinguistics
Language: en

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