Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study investigates interference effects in sentenceprocessing. A parade case involves agreement attraction,where the processing of a number mismatch between a verband its subject is eased by a number-matching lure (*Thekeytarget to the cabinetslure were rusty), relative to sentenceswhere neither noun matches the verb (*The key to the cabinetwere rusty). Existing accounts claim that this effect reflectserror-prone retrieval or misrepresentation of the target.Recently, a third account has been proposed which claims thatthe contrast between the two configurations reflects increaseddifficulty in the second sentence due to feature overwriting inthe encoding (both nouns are singular). We provide resultsfrom two self-paced reading experiments that isolate theeffects of feature overwriting and attraction by manipulatingthe presence of an agreement cue. Results showed a largerdifference within the configurations with a cue, which suggestthat attraction cannot be reduced to feature overwriting.