Using Sentence Puzzles to Explore a Timing Effect on Agreement Attraction

Presenter

Jolie Mae Lepere

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Shota Negishi, Department of Linguistics, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board C29, Poster Showcase Room (163), Row 3 (C21-C30) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

Agreement attraction errors are common errors in speech production that occur when a speaker fails to compute agreement between the subject and the main verb of a sentence. The sentence structure which commonly leads to this error is one with a singular subject and a plural distractor, for example: “the ring with the fake diamonds is/are good,” where the use of “are” would constitute an error. However, it is not known whether the timing of the availability of the plural distractor affects the error rate. It was predicted that agreement attraction errors would occur less frequently when the singular subject and main verb became available to the speaker before the plural distractor, and more frequently when the singular subject and plural distractor became available before the verb. This ongoing study is revealing that timing does not appear to determine the rate of agreement attraction errors in a sentence puzzle design where participants are asked to produce a sentence from three fragments displayed in differing orders. This study does show that this design yields an error rate of about 2.08%, which indicates that agreement attraction errors occur regardless of the order of presentation of the pre-verbal elements. In future study, a design that requires speakers to begin sentence production upon the presentation of the first fragment, the subject, may show a contrast in error rates according to timing.

Keywords

Linguistics, Agreement attraction, Speech errors, Sentence puzzle

Research Area

Linguistics and Language Studies

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