The Effect of Reduced Relative Clauses on Agreement Production
Humanities
Linguistics / LING157: Psycholinguistics and Linguistic Theory (Winter 2021)
To investigate the effect of reduced relative clauses on agreement attraction, we will use a 2✕2 factorial design in a sentence completion task. The first factor will be the type of relative clause used, and the second will be the number feature of the local noun. The head noun will always be the unmarked singular, because of the asymmetry effect mentioned in the previous paragraph. Since it has already been well established that a local noun whose number is the same as the head noun does not induce attraction (Bock 1995), the conditions with singular local nouns will provide controls with which to compare the agreement attraction rates in the conditions with mismatching numbers. Based on Bock (1995), we might expect full relative clauses and reduced relative clauses to have the same agreement attraction rates, because she found that the length of relative clauses had no effect on agreement attraction.
