Agreement Errors and Object Attraction

Abstract

The phenomenon of "attraction" (Bock & Miller, 1991), an increase in the number of verb agreement errors linked to a subject modifying noun with a grammatical number other than that of the subject head ('The key to the cabinets were lost'), is researched further here by studying the role played by syntactic function and part of speech. In a first experiment in Spanish, both variables appeared to be relevant since almost no errors were found for sentences in which the verb was preceded by an object pronoun ('La niña las come' ('The girl- them-pl eats')) as oppossed to a subject modifier noun. Two other experiments assessed the role of each variable separately in a language in which the full NP object can also precede the verb--Dutch. In Experiment 2, it was found that the attraction effect is not restricted to sentences in which the number mismatching information is embedded within the subject, since nouns with the function of direct object (DO) exert an attraction effect as well, although a smaller one. The third and last experiment showed that a least some DO pronouns exert an attraction effect as strong as that of nouns. The results support the hypothesis that the number of phrasal nodes intervening between local element and subject head noun determines the strength of attraction effects; and that, at least some, pronouns are retrieved in relation to their nominal antecedents.