Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction
For psycholinguistics, it provides a computational account of why morphological syncretism affects agreement attraction differently across languages, though results are partial and incremental.
The study uses LLM-derived measures (surprisal, attention entropy) to replicate cross-linguistic patterns of agreement attraction, finding that syncretism modulates attraction in English and German but not Turkish, with partial replication for Russian.
Agreement attraction errors, in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun rather than its grammatical head, are amplified by morphological syncretism in some languages (English, German, Russian) but not others (Turkish, Armenian), a cross-linguistic pattern without a principled account. We use surprisal and attention entropy from large language models as processing proxies to investigate this variation across four languages. LLM-derived measures replicate behavioral findings in English and German (syncretism modulates attraction), align with Turkish null results (no modulation), and partially capture Russian patterns. We discuss further directions for better understanding why syncretism affects agreement attraction differently across languages.