Attraction effects are well established with plural local nouns (e.g., Bock & Miller, 1991) and have recently been observed with singular local nouns (Haskell & Bock, 2003).
Agreement processes involving more complex number systems have long been the subject of debate in the linguistics literature (see Corbett, 2000), but psycholinguists have thus far concentrated on attraction effects in two-way systems.
We report a study that employed the three-way number distinction in Slovenian to address the issue of markedness, namely, whether there is a binary distinction between marked plurals and unmarked singulars as claimed by Eberhard (1997) for English, or graded number specifications (Haskell & Bock, 2003).
Eberhard's claims would lead to a prediction of a marked form and an unmarked form, but could not explain differences between the two unmarked forms. If Slovenian follows the same pattern as English, we would expect the singular to be the unmarked default and thus susceptible to agreement errors yet not causing them; conversely, the dual and plural would form the marked class, and would cause errors on the singular, but not be prone to errors after a singular local noun. Dual and plural marking in the same item would be in equal competition.
If the model were to incorporate a third level of markedness, then differences between the dual and plural could be explained, provided that the singular was unmarked. According to Corbett (2000), we would expect the markedness to be ordered: singular < plural < dual.
Native speakers of Slovenian performed a sentence completion task involving a preamble (a complex NP containing a head noun and a postmodifying relative clause), and a verb independently rated as more plausible with the head than the local noun. The number values of the head and local noun were manipulated, yielding 9 different conditions.
Bik (Bika/i), ki (sta/so) ga (ju/jih) je
Bull(Bulls-d/p) that AUX-d/p OBJ-s d/p AUX-s
zabodel(zabodla/li) ponosen(ponosna/ni) matador (/ja/ji)
stab-s (stab-d/p) proud-s (proud-d/p) matador (matadors-d/p)
- raniti se
- injure REFLEXIVE
A bull (bulls) that a proud matador (proud matadors) stabbed - injure oneself
We see agreement effects with a singular local noun and smaller effects after a plural local noun, as well as larger effects after a dual local noun. These results are discussed in terms of implications for models of agreement production.
References
Bock, J. K. & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive
Psychology, 23, 45-93.
Corbett, G. G. (2000). Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eberhard, K. M. (1997). The marked effect of number on subject-verb
agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 147-164.
Haskell, T. & Bock, J. K. (2003). Singular attraction in subject-verb
agreement. Paper presented at the 16th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing 2003.