Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects

Jan Chromý; Radim Lacina; Jakub Dotlačil

doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00107

Number Agreement Attraction in Czech Comprehension: Negligible Facilitation Effects

Open Mind (Camb). 2023 Oct 27:7:802-836. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00107. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Jan Chromý¹, Radim Lacina^{2

3}, Jakub Dotlačil⁴

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Czech Language and Theory of Communication, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
² Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
³ Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
⁴ Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Abstract

Number agreement attraction in comprehension has been extensively studied in various languages and it has been claimed that attraction effects are generally present across languages. In this paper, four experiments on Czech are presented, each examining a different structure. The Bayesian hierarchical models and Bayes factor analysis pointed towards no agreement attraction effects in three of the experiments. Only in one experiment an effect interpretable as signaling agreement attraction was observed. Its size, however, was so small that it did not translate into a clear preference for models with agreement attraction. The data from the four experiments were further compared to available data from several other languages (English, Armenian, Arabic, and Spanish). The emerging picture is that in Czech, agreement attraction effects are negligible in size if they appear at all. This presents a serious challenge to current theoretical explanations of agreement attraction effects.

Keywords: Czech; agreement; attraction; interference; sentence processing; syncretism.