How gender affects number: cue-based retrieval in agreement production

This study presents a re-analysis of data from Foote and Bock, aimed at determining how cue-based retrieval works in agreement production by focusing on the role of grammatical gender in number agreement. By examining previously collected production data on number agreement in Mexican and Dominican...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language, cognition and neuroscience cognition and neuroscience, 2015-09, Vol.30 (8), p.947-954
Main Authors: Lorimor, Heidi, Jackson, Carrie N., Foote, Rebecca
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
agreement
cue-based retrieval
Data processing
Experiments
gender
Grammatical agreement
Grammatical gender
Grammatical number
Language varieties
Nouns
number
Spanish language
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Summary:This study presents a re-analysis of data from Foote and Bock, aimed at determining how cue-based retrieval works in agreement production by focusing on the role of grammatical gender in number agreement. By examining previously collected production data on number agreement in Mexican and Dominican Spanish with both overt subjects (Experiment 1) and null subjects (Experiment 2), we show that errors in number agreement are more likely in both varieties of Spanish when the subject head noun and local noun match in grammatical gender, but only when the subject is pronounced (Experiment 1). We interpret this effect of grammatical gender using models of cue-based retrieval and show how this effect exists in addition to, and not in place of, other mechanisms that affect agreement, such as agreement attraction (via feature percolation) and notional number.
ISSN:2327-3798
2327-3801
DOI:10.1080/23273798.2015.1047461