TY - JOUR
T1 - Misretrieval but not misrepresentation
T2 - A feature misbinding account of post-interpretive effects in number attraction
AU - Dempsey, Jack
AU - Christianson, Kiel
AU - Tanner, Darren Scott
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Experimental Psychology Society 2021.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs, but no processing cost for grammatical verbs. While this has favoured cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband offered offline evidence suggesting that comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty noun phrase (NP) representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e., no number cue from verb). Although no online evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence rapid serial visual presentation experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband, suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.
AB - Attraction effects in comprehension have reliably shown a grammaticality asymmetry in which mismatching plural attractors confer facilitatory interference for ungrammatical verbs, but no processing cost for grammatical verbs. While this has favoured cue-based retrieval accounts of attraction phenomena in comprehension, Patson and Husband offered offline evidence suggesting that comprehenders systematically misrepresent number information in attraction phrases, leaving open the possibility for faulty noun phrase (NP) representations later in processing. The current study employs two self-paced reading discourse experiments to test for number attraction misrepresentations in real time. Specifically, the attraction phrases occurred as embedded direct object phrases, allowing for a direct test of the role of attractor noun number in head noun number misrepresentation (i.e., no number cue from verb). Although no online evidence for misrepresentation was found, a third single-sentence rapid serial visual presentation experiment showed error rates to offline probes corroborating the post-interpretive findings from Patson and Husband, suggesting that a search in memory for associative features may not employ the same processes as the formation of dependencies in discourse comprehension. The findings are discussed in the framework of feature misbinding in memory in line with recent post-interpretive accounts of offline comprehension errors.
KW - Agreement attraction
KW - cue-based retrieval
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120610247&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85120610247&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/17470218211061578
DO - 10.1177/17470218211061578
M3 - Article
C2 - 34763578
AN - SCOPUS:85120610247
JO - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
JF - Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
SN - 1747-0218
ER -