Special session:
agreement attraction

PsychoSlav 2024 will host a special session on agreement attraction in Slavic.

Agreement attraction is one of the widely studied phenomenon in psycholinguistics; it refers to the computation of subject-verb agreement disrupted by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns. However, attraction does not uniformly impact grammatical dependencies: while subject-verb agreement typically shows number attraction, anaphoric dependencies with reflexives and pronouns display a mixed profile (Dillon et al., 2013; Patil et al., 2016; Sturt, 2003). Although traditionally attraction scholarship has focused on Germanic and Romance languages, investigations of Russian and Czech have contributed new insights into the strength of different interference accounts (Laurinavichyute et al., 2017), the impact of case syncretism on attraction effects (Slioussar, 2018), and the uniformity of attraction effects cross-linguistically (Chromý et al., 2023; Lacina, 2023; Lacina & Chromý, 2022). 

The mixed picture emerging from attraction studies across languages, as well as the many unanswered questions about the nature and directionality of attraction motivated the organization of this Special Session as a forum for discussion of comprehension of agreement attraction in Slavic. We welcome submissions addressing but not limited to the following questions:

a) Vulnerability of different grammatical dependencies to agreement attraction in Slavic languages – universal or language-specific? 

b) Can cross-linguistic studies of two Slavic languages or a Slavic and non-Slavic language throw more light on the underlying causes of resilience to attraction effects? 

c) What is the role of experimental design, task demands and response bias in attraction effects?  

d) What can methods with different temporal resolution (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) reveal about the existence and directionality of attraction?  

e) If case information is found to modulate attraction effects, what are the precise mechanisms responsible for it?

f) Are cognitive factors, such as memory and attention, predictors of attraction effects?   

g) How can scholarship on agreement attraction in Slavic contribute to the ongoing debate about encoding-based vs. cue-based retrieval account of attraction? 

References

Chromý, J., Lacina, R., & Dotlačil, J. (2023). Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects. Open Mind, 7, 802-836.

Dillon, B., Mishler, A., Sloggett, S., & Phillips, C. (2013). Contrasting intrusion profiles for agreement and anaphora: Experimental and modeling evidence. Journal of Memory and Language, 69(2), 85-103.

Lacina, R. (2023). Under no illusion: An acceptability study on Czech agreement attraction.

Lacina, R., & Chromý, J. (2022). No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 44, No. 44).

Laurinavichyute, A., Jäger, L. A., Akinina, Y., Roß, J., & Dragoy, O. (2017). Retrieval and encoding interference: Cross-linguistic evidence from anaphor processing. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 965.

Patil, U., Vasishth, S., & Lewis, R. L. (2016). Retrieval interference in syntactic processing: The case of reflexive binding in English. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 329.

Slioussar, N. (2018). Forms and features: The role of syncretism in number agreement attraction. Journal of Memory and Language, 101, 51-63.

Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(3), 542-562.