Are feature assignment errors due to attraction? The case of Bulgarian numeral phrase.

ABSTRACT: Well-studied attraction errors in speakers' production of subject-verb agreement arise from featural similarity between the attractor and the target (e. g., the verb) in the context of a specific syntactic relationship characterized by structural distance. This study examines production errors in a related but distinct type of featural manipulation: feature assignment in numeral phrases with modifiers such as "five rusty old windows," in Bulgarian. The grammar of this language requires plural markers on the modifiers and a morphological count form on the final noun which speakers often erroneously replace with a regular plural form. In a series of four sentence completion experiments we demonstrate that speakers' errors in count form assignment are subject to linear rather than structural

SUBMITTER: Khristov D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12303052 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature