Object attraction in subject-verb agreement construction

Three experiments in which errors of subject-verb agreement were elicited a ssessed the effects of syntactic function and part of speech of the constit uent appearing immediately before the verb. Bock and Miller (1991) have sho wn that constituents modifying the subject exert an "attraction effect," an increased rate of agreement errors when that constituent has a grammatical number different from that of the subject head noun. Experiment Ia. conduc ted in Dutch, showed that such an attraction effect is not restricted to se ntences in which the number mismatching information is embedded within the subject: Direct-object noun phrases exert an attraction effect as well, alt hough a smaller one than subject modifier noun phrases. Experiment lb repli cated this effect with new materials, excluding a possible confound with pl ausibility of the sentences. Experiment 2 showed that direct-object pronoun s exert an attraction effect about as strong as that observed with nouns, u nless the pronoun is explicitly case-marked. In such circumstances no attra ction effect obtains. These results are interpreted within the hypothesis t hat the number of phrasal nodes intervening between "attractor" and subject head noun determines the strength of attraction effects. (C) 2001 Academic Press.