The time-course of feature interference in agreement comprehension: Multiple mechanisms and asymmetrical attraction

• Agreement attraction reduced P600 to ungrammaticalities.
• No impact of attraction in grammatical sentences.
• Mechanisms of attraction in comprehension and production are non-identical.
• Agreement comprehension relies on prediction and cue-based memory retrieval.

Attraction interference in language comprehension and production may be as a result of common or different processes. In the present paper, we investigate attraction interference during language comprehension, focusing on the contexts in which interference arises and the time-course of these effects. Using evidence from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and sentence judgment times, we show that agreement attraction in comprehension is best explained as morphosyntactic interference during memory retrieval. This stands in contrast to attraction as involving the representation of the subject NP’s root-node number feature, which is a strong contributor to attraction in production. We thus argue that the cognitive antecedents of agreement attraction in comprehension are non-identical with those of attraction in production, and moreover, that attraction in comprehension is primarily a consequence of similarity-based interference in cue-based memory retrieval processes. We suggest that mechanisms responsible for attraction during language comprehension are a subset of those involved in language production.