Ristic, B. 1 , Mancini, S. 1 & Molinaro, N. 1, 2
1 BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 Ikerbasque
According to the most of the psycholinguistic literature, non-adjacent dependencies involve retrieval. Thus, in subject-verb agreement processing, the subject is processed, stored in memory, and then retrieved at the verb. Other studies, though, suggest that some features of elements can be predictively maintained in nonadjacent dependencies such as wh-movement. The current study investigates subject-verb agreement to see if morphosyntactic features can be predictively maintained in Basque. We created sentences in which matrix subjects and verbs are separated by embedded clauses, which contained temporarily number-ambiguous nouns (singular/plural), later disambiguated. We manipulated the number inflection of the matrix subject (singular/plural), to see if it can be maintained and thus bias the number-ambiguous noun towards singular/plural interpretation, before its disambiguation (singular: Nere ahizpa[SG], mutilak maite duena[SG]/dituena[PL], desagertu egin zen; My sister, whom the boy loves/ who loves the boys, disappeared; plural: Nere ahizpek[PL], mutilak maite dituenak[SG]/dituztenak[PL], kotxe bat erosi zuten; My sisters, whom the boy loves/who love the boys, bought a car). In a visual world paradigm, 28 native Basque speakers listened to 60 sentences while looking at both singular and plural versions of the number-ambiguous nouns. We analyzed the proportion of looks towards singular or plural images while hearing the ambiguous word, as a function of matrix subject number. A general looking preference towards plural images emerged (plural: 52%, singular: 27%), as well as a significant interaction of the image and the matrix subject number (Intercept=.42, Estimate=.08, SE=.04, t=2.06, p=.03). This suggests that the subject?s number is actively maintained throughout the sentence, in order to establish number agreement with the upcoming verb. This is in line with the existent research on language prediction, but contrary to the psycholinguistic accounts supporting retrieval. We propose that predictive maintenance is involved in subject-verb agreement to ensure its establishment, being one of the core syntactic relations.