Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There is growing interest in exploring the interaction of semantics with outlier information sources in sentence processing. Tliis study explores the role of noun animacy in these processes in combination with syntactic (word order) and morphological (mmiber marking) factors by means of an on-line agency assignment task in Bulgarian. Unlike smiilar studies, the preparation of the stimuli follows a rigorous series of pro-tests which reveal the gradable nature of animacy and attempt to account for the interaction of verb semantics (agency reversibility) with noun semantics (anmiacy contrast). Results confirm expectations of tlie high significance of agreement in Bulgarian and present a challenge to the binary view of animacy. Some of tire predictions on cue interaction within the Competition Model are put to the test and generally confirmed.