Syntactic agreement attraction reflects working memory processes

ABSTRACT

Does producing syntactic agreement rely on syntactic or memory-based retrieval processes? The present study investigated the extent to which syntactic processing deficits and working memory (WM) deficits predict susceptibility to agreement attraction [Bock, K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93], where speakers tend to erroneously produce plural agreement for a singular subject when another noun in the sentence is grammatically plural. Four brain-injured patients with varying degrees of grammatical and WM deficits completed sentences with local nouns that matched or mismatched in number with the head noun, and that were plausible or implausible subjects. Both aspects of grammatical deficits and the extent of WM deficits predicted the extent of agreement attraction effects. These data are consistent with the proposal that producing an agreeing verb involves a cue-based search in WM for an appropriate controlling noun, which is subject to interference from other elements in memory with similar properties [cf. Badecker, W., & Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1), 65–85. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.004].

KEYWORDS:

• Syntactic agreement
• language production
• short-term memory
• aphasia

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

We thank A. Cris Hamilton and Simon Fischer-Baum for helpful comments and advice, Corinne Allen, Kelly Banneyer, and Sanam Jivani for assistance with data collection, and the patients and their families for their participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

L. Robert Slevc http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5183-6786

Notes

1 Retrieved from http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/bushquotes/a/topbushisms2004.htm.

2 Memory-based accounts of agreement generally implicate WM rather than STM, which are dissociable constructs (e.g. Engle, Tuholski, Laughlin, & Conway, 1999). However, the semantic STM deficits investigated here and in a large body of previous work (see, e.g. Martin, 2005, for a review) not only involve problems in maintenance (i.e. STM), but also processing deficits characteristic of control processes (Hamilton & Martin, 2005, 2007; Hoffman, Jefferies, & Lambon Ralph, 2011; Martin & Allen, 2008; Novick et al., 2009; Thompson-Schill et al., 2002). That is, these patients’ deficits likely reflect both storage and processing components of memory and so can be considered to be a type of WM deficit. However, these patients have historically been referred to as “semantic STM” patients and so, for comparability with past work, we use the terms WM and semantic STM largely interchangeably in this manuscript.

3 Another QPA measure, the embedding index, which reflects the proportion of sentences with an embedded structure would also be relevant to the issue of the ability to form hierarchical structure. However, because the range of the embedding index for control participants includes 0 and because it has low reliability in scoring, this measure is not included in Table 1.

4 EV, MB, and SJ had more trials excluded from the plural local NP than from the singular local NP conditions (most strikingly, MB did not correctly produce the preamble for 57% of the locally-plural trials, in comparison to only 6% of the locally singular trials). In contrast, BB's exclusions were equal for sentences with plural and with singular local nouns. Excluded trials showed no consistent pattern as a function of local plausibility.

5 Note that 6 items had to be excluded from the comparison of BB and EV and 14 items from the comparison of BB and SJ due to missing values.

6 Note that there were only half as many filler items with a plural head and a (singular or plural) local noun as critical items with a singular head NP (the other half of the filler items did not include a local noun) and that the grammatical number of the local noun was not counterbalanced across items. Because of this, these statistical comparisons relied on logistic mixed effects models with participants and items treated as crossed random effects.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by NIH [grant number F32 DC-008723].