Abstract
The present study examined whether type of inflectional case (semantic or grammatical) and phonological and morphological transparency affect the processing of Finnish modifier-head agreement in reading. Readers’ eye movement patterns were registered. In Experiment 1, an agreeing modifier condition (agreement was transparent) was compared with a no-modifier condition, and in Experiment 2, similar constructions with opaque agreement were used. In both experiments, agreement was found to affect the processing of the target noun with some delay. In Experiment 3, unmarked and case-marked modifiers were used. The results again demonstrated a delayed agreement effect, ruling out the possibility that the agreement effects observed in Experiments 1 and 2 reflect a mere modifier-presence effect. We concluded that agreement exerts its effect at the level of syntactic integration but not at the level of lexical access.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Akhutina, T., Kurgansky, A., Polinsky, M., & Bates, E. (1999). Processing of grammatical gender in a three-gender system: Experimental evidence from Russian. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 695–713.
Badecker, W., & Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory & Language, 56, 65–85.
Barber, H., & Carreiras, M. (2005). Grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish: An ERP comparison. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 137–153.
Blake, B. J. (2001). Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bock, K., & Eberhard, K. M. (1993). Meaning, sound and syntax in English number agreement. Language & Cognitive Processes, 8, 57–99.
Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Meyer, A. S. (2004). Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 251–278.
Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83–128.
Clifton, C., Jr., Staub, A., & Rayner, K. (2007). Eye movements in reading words and sentences. In R. P. G. van Gompel, M. H. Fischer, W. S. Murray, & R. L. Hill (Eds.), Eye movements: A window on mind and brain (pp. 341–371). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Coulson, S., King, J. W., & Kutas, M. (1998). Expect the unexpected: Event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations. Language & Cognitive Processes, 13, 21–58.
Deutsch, A., & Bentin, S. (2001). Syntactic and semantic factors in processing gender agreement in Hebrew: Evidence from ERPs and eye movements. Journal of Memory & Language, 45, 200–224.
Deutsch, A., Bentin, S., & Katz, L. (1999). Semantic influence on processing gender agreement: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 515–535.
Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559.
Friederici, A. D., Steinhauer, K., & Frisch, S. (1999). Lexical integration: Sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information. Memory & Cognition, 27, 438–453.
Frost, R., Deutsch, A., Gilboa, O., Tannenbaum, M., & Marslen-Wilson, W. (2000). Morphological priming: Dissociation of phonological, semantic, and morphological factors. Memory & Cognition, 28, 1277–1288.
Greenberg, S. N., Healy, A. F., Koriat, A., & Kreiner, H. (2004). The GO model: A reconsideration of the role of structural units in guiding and organizing text on line. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 428–433.
Gunter, T. C., Friederici, A. D., & Schriefers, H. (2000). Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 556–568.
Gurjanov, M., Lukatela, G., Moscovljević, J., Savić, M., & Turvey, M. T. (1985). Grammatical priming of inflected nouns by inflected adjectives. Cognition, 19, 55–71.
Hartsuiker, R. J., Schriefers, H. J., Bock, K., & Kikstra, G. M. (2003). Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement. Memory & Cognition, 31, 1316–1326.
Hyönä, J., & Hujanen, H. (1997). Effects of case marking and word order on sentence parsing in Finnish: An eye fixation analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 50A, 841–858.
Hyönä, J., & Lindeman, J. (1994). Syntactic context effects on word recognition: A developmental study. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 35, 27–37.
Hyönä, J., & Vainio, S. (2001). Reading morphologically complex clause structures in Finnish. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 13, 451–474.
Hyönä, J., Vainio, S., & Laine, M. (2002). A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 14, 417–433.
Kaan, E., Harris, A., Gibson, E., & Holcomb, P. (2000). The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty. Language & Cognitive Processes, 15, 159–201.
Laine, M., & Virtanen, P. (1999). WordMill, Lexical Search Program [Computer software]. Turku, Finland: University of Turku.
Laudanna, A., & Burani, C. (1995). Distributional properties of derivational affixes: Implications for processing. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 345–364). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lukatela, G., Kostić, A., Todorović, D., Carello, C., & Turvey, M. T. (1987). Type and number of violations and the grammatical congruency effect in lexical decision. Psychological Research, 49, 37–43.
MacWhinney, B., & Pleh, C. (1997). Double agreement: Role identification in Hungarian. Language & Cognitive Processes, 12, 67–102.
Marslen-Wilson, W., Tyler, L. K., Waksler, R., & Older, L. (1994). Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psychological Review, 101, 3–33.
Nicol, J. L., Forster, K., & Veres, C. (1997). Subject-verb agreement processes in comprehension. Journal of Memory & Language, 36, 569–587.
Nikolova, R., & Jarema, G. (2002). Interaction of morphological structure and prefix transparency in the processing of Bulgarian aspectual verb forms. Brain & Language, 81, 649–665.
Osterhout, L., & Mobley, L. A. (1995). Event-related brain potentials elicited by failure to agree. Journal of Memory & Language, 34, 739–773.
Pearlmutter, N. J., Garnsey, S. M., & Bock, K. (1999). Agreement processes in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory & Language, 41, 427–456.
Rayner, K., & Duffy, S. A. (1986). Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory & Cognition, 14, 191–201.
Schreuder, R., & Baayen, R. H. (1995). Modeling morphological processing. In L. B. Feldman (Ed.), Morphological aspects of language processing (pp. 131–154). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schriefers, H., Friederici, A. D., & Rose, U. (1998). Context effects in visual word recognition: Lexical relatedness and syntactic context. Memory & Cognition, 26, 1292–1303.
Sereno, S. C., Rayner, K., & Posner, M. I. (1998). Establishing a time-line of word recognition: Evidence from eye movements and event-related potentials. NeuroReport, 9, 2195–2200.
Sulkala, H., & Karjalainen, M. (1992). Finnish. New York: Routledge.
Taft, M. (1994). Interactive-activation as a framework for understanding morphological processing. Language & Cognitive Processes, 9, 271–294.
Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (2003). Plausibility and grammatical agreement. Journal of Memory & Language, 48, 740–759.
Vainio, S., Hyönä, J., & Pajunen, A. (2003). Facilitatory and inhibitory effects of grammatical agreement: Evidence from readers’ eye fixation patterns. Brain & Language, 85, 197–202.
Vilkuna, M. (1989). Free word order in Finnish: Its syntax and discourse functions. Helsinki: SKS.
Virtanen, P., & Pajunen, A. (2000). ContextMill [Computer software]. Turku, Finland: University of Turku.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This study was also partly supported by Grant 118404 from the Academy of Finland to Raymond Bertram.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Vainio, S., Hyönä, J. & Pajunen, A. Processing modifier-head agreement in reading: Evidence for a delayed effect of agreement. Memory & Cognition 36, 329–340 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.2.329
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.2.329