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Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction

Summary

Agreement attraction occurs when a verb wrongly agrees with an intervening noun instead of its true subject. In English, German and Russian, the effect grows when the attractor is morphologically syncretic with the subject, but Turkish and Armenian show no such boost. No principled account of this variation exists. Turk and Neu use large language models as a uniform stand-in for human processing across English, German, Russian and Turkish. They take two measures at the verb. The first is surprisal from GPT-2-style autoregressive models. The second is attention entropy over candidate controller nouns, computed from syntactically selected heads of BERT-style bidirectional models. The model measures reproduce syncretism-modulated attraction in English and German and the absence of modulation in Turkish. Russian is matched only in part: the standard accusative pattern appears, but the pseudo-plural effect does not. Surprisal gave clearer signals than attention entropy. The work offers a cross-linguistic computational baseline for asking how much different languages lean on morphological cues when tracking dependencies.

Key points

  • The study is framed by cue-based retrieval (ACT-R; Wagers et al., 2009). The idea is that syncretic forms carry multiple feature sets, which raises the chance of a partial match and therefore of misretrieval.
  • The method follows Ryu and Lewis (2021). Lower verb surprisal and more diffuse attention toward the attractor are read as stronger attraction.
  • Turkish: a plural attractor lowered surprisal by a similar amount in both conditions (non-syncretic Δ = −0.691; syncretic Δ = −0.590). Bayesian analysis showed no three-way interaction (P = 0.332), and entropy changes were nearly identical (0.017 vs 0.016).
  • Russian: the models did not reproduce the human finding that genitive singular attractors, which are syncretic with the nominative plural, interfere more. The authors suggest LLMs depend more on syntactic context than on surface morphological overlap.
  • The authors propose that syncretism effects may be strongest in fusional or sparse-morphology languages, and weaker in agglutinative ones such as Turkish and Armenian.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.16

@inproceedings{turk2026quantifying,
  title = {{Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction}},
  author = {Turk, Utku and Neu, Eva},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.16},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.scil-main.16}
}

References

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