TY - JOUR
T1 - The time-course of feature interference in agreement comprehension
T2 - Multiple mechanisms and asymmetrical attraction
AU - Tanner, Darren
AU - Nicol, Janet
AU - Brehm, Laurel
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Lee Osterhout and Judith McLaughlin. Portions of this research were conducted while the first author was supported by NSF Grant OISE-0968369 (Experiment 3) and the William Orr Dingwall Neurolinguistics Fellowship (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiments 1 and 2 were also partially funded by NIDCD Grant R01DC01947 and NSF Grant BCS-0951595 . We would like to thank Martin Pickering and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript.
PY - 2014/10
Y1 - 2014/10
N2 - Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as involving the representation of the subject NP's root-node number feature, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval processes. We suggest that mechanisms responsible for attraction during language comprehension are a subset of those involved in language production.
AB - Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as involving the representation of the subject NP's root-node number feature, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval processes. We suggest that mechanisms responsible for attraction during language comprehension are a subset of those involved in language production.
KW - Agreement
KW - Language comprehension
KW - Morphosyntactic processing
KW - P600
KW - Retrieval interference
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jml.2014.07.003
DO - 10.1016/j.jml.2014.07.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84905463375
SN - 0749-596X
VL - 76
SP - 195
EP - 215
JO - Journal of Memory and Language
JF - Journal of Memory and Language
ER -