Paper

Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction

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Abstract

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.  

Keywords: cross-linguistic variation, large language models, agreement attraction, cue-based retrieval, subject-verb agreement, syncretism

How to Cite:

Türk, U. & Neu, E., (2026) “Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attraction”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4030