LSLT: Utku Türk (LING)

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Sources of Bias in Psycholinguistic Data

Abstract: Effects known as ‘agreement attraction’ are robust with ungrammatical sentences in various languages with different syntactic structures but rarely encountered in grammatical sentences. This asymmetry supported retrieval accounts in which readers retrieve a number-matching attractor using the cues given by the verb if they cannot retrieve the subject. Recently, Hammerly, Staub, and Dillon (2019) showed that participants’ default bias towards grammatical responses may also explain this asymmetry and the symmetrical effects when the response bias is neutralized, which cannot be explained under retrieval accounts. However, their response bias estimate confounded with the magnitude of the agreement attraction effects.

In our study, we attempt to replicate and clarify the interaction between response bias and agreement attraction. To this end, we conducted a speeded acceptability judgment task in Turkish using a complex noun phrase with a genitive-marked modifier. Moreover, we only used filler items in our response bias calculation to have a clearer picture of response bias. Results of our speeded acceptability judgment task showed that comprehenders exhibited attraction effects in grammatical sentences as well and confirmed the theoretical claims of Hammerly et al. (2019), thus challenging retrieval accounts.