Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Morphosyntactic agreement refers to a head-dependent relation where similar features are shared between syntactic con-stituents. Several grammatical features are expressed in agreement relations through different manifestations of exponence(e.g. separative and cumulative). Whereas prior research has largely examined features in separative exponence (e.g. gen-der and number), this study investigates differences in the on-line processing of features in cumulative exponence. Usingeye tracking, we investigated differences between second language (L2) learner processing of person, number, and tensefeatures in Spanish verbal agreement. We also examined the effect of working memory capacity (WMC) on learnerson-line processing of these same features. The results of our linear mixed effects model indicated learners had greaterperturbation in processing person and tense agreement violations compared to number agreement violations. The resultsalso revealed that learners with higher WMC demonstrated less perturbation to agreement violations of each feature typethan learners with lower WMC.