Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior studies on agreement attraction in sentence production have investigated the differences in verb and reflexive agreement planning, as evidenced by a distinction in their error rates. This study investigated two possible accounts: Planning Order, where verbs and reflexives share the same underlying mechanism that is applied at different stages, and Number Source, where verbs and reflexives retrieve features from different sources. To further adjudicate between the two, we extended the empirical ground to reflexives in complement and adjunct positions. Results replicated previous findings on the distinction between verbs and reflexives, while no significant difference was found in attraction effects among reflexive conditions, thereby supporting Number Source. Predicted by neither account, we novelly observed a significant increase in baseline error rate for adjunct but an insignificant increase for complement, suggesting a finer-grained Number Source model sensitive to syntactic structural differences.