Staub Adrian
Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
J Mem Lang. 2009 Feb;60(2):308. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2008.11.002.
Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and to investigate the relative latency of errors and correct agreement decisions. The presence of a number attractor reliably increased correct RT, and the size of this RT effect was consistently larger in conditions that also had larger effects on accuracy. Number attraction errors, however, were similar in RT to correct responses in the same experimental condition. These results are interpreted as supporting a model according to which an intervening number attractor makes the agreement computation process more difficult in general (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005), with errors arising probabilistically. However, attraction from a non-intervening noun resulted in only mildly inflated correct RT, but dramatically inflated error RT, suggesting that non-intervening attraction errors may reflect confusion about the structure of the subject phrase.
在存在与主语短语中心词数量不同的局部名词时，说话者经常会出现主谓一致的数量错误。一系列四项实验采用二选一反应时（RT）范式，来研究数量吸引词的存在如何调节正确一致决策的潜伏期，并研究错误和正确一致决策的相对潜伏期。数量吸引词的存在可靠地增加了正确反应时，并且在对准确性也有较大影响的条件下，这种反应时效应的大小始终更大。然而，数量吸引错误在反应时上与同一实验条件下的正确反应相似。这些结果被解释为支持这样一种模型，即一般来说，中间的数量吸引词会使一致计算过程更加困难（埃伯哈德、卡廷和博克，2005），错误以概率形式出现。然而，来自非中间名词的吸引只会使正确反应时略有增加，但会使错误反应时大幅增加，这表明非中间吸引错误可能反映了对主语短语结构的混淆。
