Attraction Effects for Verbal Gender and Number Are Similar but Not Identical: Self-Paced Reading Evidence From Modern Standard Arabic

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Matthew A. Tucker¹  Ali Idrissi³  Diogo Almeida¹ 

[1] Mind and Brain Lab, Division of Science, Psychology Program, New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates;Inc., United States;The Neurocognition of Language Lab, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University

关键词: Arabic;    agreement;    agreement attraction;    self-paced reading;    verbal gender;    verbal number;    phi-features;    meta-analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.586464

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Previous work on the comprehension of agreement has shown that incorrectly inflected verbs do not trigger responses typically seen with fully ungrammatical verbs when the preceding sentential context furnishes a possibly matching distractor noun (i.e., agreement attraction). We report eight studies, three being direct replications, designed to assess the degree of similarity of these errors in the comprehension of subject-verb agreement along the dimensions of grammatical gender and number in Modern Standard Arabic. A meta-analysis of the results demonstrate the presence of agreement attraction effects in reading comprehension for gender and number on verbs. Moreover, the meta-analysis demonstrates that these two features do not behave identically: gender effects are larger and occur later relative to number attraction effects. These results challenge models of agreement that predict agreement features to be equipotent and show that real-time models of agreement require modifications in the form of cue-weighting in order to account for these differential results.

【 授权许可】

CC BY