The emergence of attraction errors during sentence comprehension

1.3. WHAT’S NEW? 7
‘the best friend I have, he lies in the innkeeper’s cellar’
(cited after Grimm, 1866)
Case attraction received quite a bit of attention—in the traditional philological
literature (e.g., Behaghel, 1928; Grimm, 1866; Erdmann, 1874; Wunder, 1965)
as well as in the modern linguistic literature (e.g., Bianchi, 1999, 2000b; Grimm,
2005, 2007; Harbert, 1989; Pittner, 1995).
1.3 What’s New?
My preoccupation with attraction errors started rather accidentally. When running
participants in a series of experiments using the method of speeded-grammaticality
judgments, I noticed that many of them had difficulties with one particular sentence
in the training material. This particular sentence is given in (12).
(12) Du hättest mir sagen sollen, dass Martin, dessen ELTERN mir oft
you had me tell should that M. whose parents me often
geholfen haben, einen schweren Verkehrsunfall hatte.
helped have a serious car-accident had.SG
‘You should have told me that Martin whose parents often helped me had
a serious car accident.’
The sentence is grammatical, agreement requirements are obeyed. The embedded
subject Martin is a singular proper name and the corresponding auxiliary is singular
too. Nevertheless, people rejected the sentence strikingly often. Apparently,
they were distracted by the intervening plural NP dessen Eltern and expected a
plural verb. In other words, they experienced an illusionary agreement violation
which caused them to reject the sentence.
The excitement about this discovery was followed by some disappointment
when I learned that something similar has been observed earlier—in descriptions
of English grammar (Jespersen, 1913, 1924; Quirk et al., 1985; Strang,
1966; Zandvoort, 1961) as well as in the processing literature (Bock and Miller,
1991 and much subsequent work). As introduced above, the literature commonly
refers to the phenomenon as ‘attraction’ and attributes it to performance factors—
difficulties in keeping track the subject’s number specification. Bock and Cutting
(1992) quote Otto Jespersen who hypothesized that “if the verb comes long after
its subject, there is no more mental energy left to remember what was the number
of the subject” (Jespersen, 1924 cited after Bock and Cutting, 1992). Bock and
Miller (1991) mark the beginning of an intensive exploration of attraction errors
by means of psycholinguistic experiments. Although the literature is meanwhile
vast, a closer look reveals some aspects that received only little consideration. The