Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction
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Abstract (arXiv)
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.
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References · 8
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
- 2019What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attentioncited by 1,003
- 2019Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Prunedcited by 856
- 2020On the Predictive Power of Neural Language Models for Human Real-Time Comprehension Behaviorcited by 119
- 2020Human Sentence Processing: Recurrence or Attention?cited by 51
- 2021Accounting for Agreement Phenomena in Sentence Comprehension with Transformer Language Models: Effects of Similarity-based Interference on Surprisal and Attentioncited by 27
- 2023A Language Model with Limited Memory Capacity Captures Interference in Human Sentence Processingcited by 22
- 2022Entropy- and Distance-Based Predictors From GPT-2 Attention Patterns Predict Reading Times Over and Above GPT-2 Surprisalcited by 14
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