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

• 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
• ISSN: 2327-3798; 2327-3801
• DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2015.1047461

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.