Comparison Effects of Agreement Attraction in English and in Russian

In this study, we are looking at the phenomenon of agreement attraction. Agreement attraction is a type of error that occurs when a verb agrees with a noun other than its subject, as in “The key to the cabinets are rusty”. These other nouns are called ‘attractors’ because they are ‘drawing’ attraction. Previous studies have shown that amount of agreement errors increases with the marked attractors: for example, attractors marked for the plural number in comparison with singular or for female gender in comparison with the masculine. My previous studies of agreement attraction in person show the same effect in the comparison between the second and third person in the Russian language. The assumed reason is that the more marked values of a class will be stronger attractors than the less marked. In this study, we compare agreement attraction in person in English and in Russian. Agreement attraction in person has not yet been studied in English, as opposed to agreement attraction in number. We made two experiments and compared the agreement attraction in person in two languages: Russian and English. We found that attractor marked for third cause more errors in agreement in person and in English there are more errors when attractor marked for the second. Besides, we found that in Russian people read items with agreement attraction longer than English. We explain it because of difference in morphology.