| Description |
Cross-linguistic evidence shows that speakers sometimes agree a verb with an ‘attractor’ that is not its subject, even when the subject is adjacent to the verb, as in object relative clauses (e.g., *John speaks to the patients that the doctor cure). Such attraction errors are typically observed when the subject and the attractor mismatch in number or gender. However, recent evidence shows that sentence comprehension is actually penalized when these two elements match, i.e., when they are similar in terms of agreement features. Moreover, evidence from sentence production shows that agreement is also penalized when the two elements are similar in terms of semantic or syntactic features. Similarity-based interference is the signature of memory systems, and I will argue that all these effects attest to the role of memory encoding in sentence processing. I will then present direct evidence in support of that hypothesis, from a recent study conducted in my lab. Results show that modulations of attraction due to the structural position of the attractor (c-command vs. precedence) fully align with variations in parameters of memory retrieval (accessibility and dynamics), leading to the tentative conclusion that syntactic theory is, in fact, a theory of memory representations.
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