No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps
Abstract
Agreement attraction (i.e. facilitatory interference manifested by sped-up reading times) observed in establishing subject-verb number agreement by comprehenders when reading ungrammatical sentences with number-matching attractor nouns, has been long-established and cross-linguistically validated. For languages with rich inflectional morphology, case syncretism has been suggested to play a role in the phenomenon. In the present self-paced reading study on Czech, we show that unlike in other languages, facilitatory interference is not observed and that not even case syncretism is sufficient for its appearance. We put forward several possible explanations for this anomaly exhibited by Czech compared to other languages. We propose that the lack of semantic agreement in the language could be one of these. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the models of long-distance dependency resolution in comprehension.