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Regular articles

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction

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Pages 950-971 | Received 15 Apr 2014, Accepted 21 Nov 2014, Published online: 27 Jan 2015
 

Abstract

It has been well established that subject–verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.

We would like to thank Abigail Noblet for assistance collecting data and the audience at CUNY 2014 for helpful comments.

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