@article{cd0344813b534a7093580531beef2a71,
title = "The role of word frequency and morpho-orthography in agreement processing",
abstract = "Agreement attraction in comprehension (when an ungrammatical verb is read quickly if preceded by a feature-matching local noun) is well described by a cue-based retrieval framework. This suggests a role for lexical retrieval in attraction. To examine this, we manipulated two probabilistic factors known to affect lexical retrieval: local noun word frequency and morpho-orthography (agreement morphology realised with or without –s endings) in a self-paced reading study. Noun number and word frequency affected noun and verb region reading times, with higher-frequency words not eliciting attraction. Morpho-orthography impacted verb processing but not attraction: atypical plurals led to slower verb reading times regardless of verb number. Exploratory individual difference analyses further underscore the importance of lexical retrieval dynamics in sentence processing. This provides evidence that agreement operates via a cue-based retrieval mechanism over lexical representations that vary in their strength and association to number features.",
keywords = "Sentence processing, individual differences, lexical retrieval, number agreement, vocabulary",
author = "Laurel Brehm and Erika Hussey and Kiel Christianson",
note = "Funding Information: This research was supported by the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via funding from NIH training grant T32-HD055272. The authors thank members of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab, especially Kyra Michon and Yasmin Gonzalez, for their assistance with collecting and scoring data. We also are grateful for valuable feedback on the design and implementation of the experiment provided by Darren Tanner. Finally, portions of this work were presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society (Long Beach, CA), the 28th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (Los Angeles, California), and the 21st Annual Conference on the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (Valletta, Malta). We thank the attendees for their comments and suggestions. Data and scripts are archived at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ s8zmk/. Funding Information: This research was supported by the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via funding from NIH training grant T32-HD055272; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. This research was supported by the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via funding from NIH training grant T32-HD055272. The authors thank members of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab, especially Kyra Michon and Yasmin Gonzalez, for their assistance with collecting and scoring data. We also are grateful for valuable feedback on the design and implementation of the experiment provided by Darren Tanner. Finally, portions of this work were presented at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society (Long Beach, CA), the 28th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (Los Angeles, California), and the 21st Annual Conference on the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (Valletta, Malta). We thank the attendees for their comments and suggestions. Data and scripts are archived at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/s8zmk/. Funding Information: This research was supported by the Departments of Psychology and Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign via funding from NIH training grant T32-HD055272; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2019, {\textcopyright} 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.",
year = "2020",
month = jan,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1080/23273798.2019.1631456",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "35",
pages = "58--77",
journal = "Language, Cognition and Neuroscience",
issn = "2327-3798",
publisher = "Taylor and Francis",
number = "1",
}