Gender and number agreement in comprehension in Spanish

• Agreement attraction occurs in comprehension in Spanish (eye tracking).
• Rich morphology accounts for lack of semantic effects.
• Comprehension dilutes semantic effects more.

An eye-tracking experiment examined the processing of gender and number agreement in the comprehension of subject–verb-adjective sentences in Spanish. We used complex subject NPs made up of two nouns of the sort which is known to cause frequent attraction/proximity concord mistakes in production (e.g. *the name of the boys are German). The effects showed that: (1) as in attraction errors in production, readers were sensitive to a locally-distracting noun in both the number and the gender conditions; (2) number mismatches produced much stronger effects than gender mismatches; (3) number and gender effects were found in very early measures, with gender effects occurring at the verb, even before the disambiguation point was reached, which seems harder to explain in unification (as opposed to copying) accounts of agreement processes; (4) no (semantic) distributivity effects were found in reading using the same materials as those in which distributivity effects were reported in production by Vigliocco et al. (1996a); (5) gender and number mismatches did not interact, although design features of our experiments might make this result artifactual, so this conclusion needs to be taken with care. We discuss this complex pattern of results, which is too nuanced to be fully explained by any existing model, and consider how it relates to linguistic theories which make heavy use of such notions as agreement heads and agreement phases. A key issue of our research is how ‘porous’ agreement processes are, that is, how much they are affected by semantic interfacing. We argue that rich-inflection languages contain such interfacing more than poor-inflection ones.