Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Errors during sentence production have revealed crucial insights about the cognitive underpinnings of language processing. One such widely studied error is the agreement attraction error. Such errors occur when the subject-verb agreement, a crucial linguistic dependency, falters such that the verb shows the features of a ‘distractor' noun rather than that of the target subject. Previous work on agreement attraction has established similar cross-linguistic patterns, such as the number mismatch asymmetry effect. Such research suggests that the underlying mechanism might be universal. Recent studies, however, indicate that Hindi employs a language-specific strategy during agreement processing that is not reported in other languages. This raises an important question: do the cross-linguistic patterns observed in agreement processing also manifest in Hindi? Our experiment addresses this gap by using a preamble repetition task to elicit errors. Based on the nature of mismatch asymmetry and the structure of Hindi nouns, we hypothesize that if number mismatch asymmetry occurs, it should be limited to feminine nouns in Hindi. Our findings confirm the presence of mismatch asymmetry in Hindi but exclusively for feminine nouns. This suggests that while agreement mechanisms are indeed universal, they are influenced by language-specific configurations and strategies. Overall, our results can be interpreted better within a cue-based retrieval framework.