Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this presentation, I will present and discuss the results of two experiments on subject-verb agreement attraction in Persian. Attraction is a phenomenon in which a local noun (here an object NP) erroneously imposes its number feature on subject–verb agreement. The experiments used the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure (e.g., Staub 2009) involving verb selection and manipulated variables such as the c-commanding position of the object as well as the differential object marking on the accusative object. The results suggest that agreement computation breaks down along hierarchical syntactic representations and that the parser uses structural information to guide itself in a cue-based process to detect the controlling subject.