Bulgarian clitics are sensitive to number attraction

Previous research has shown that the computation of subject-verb number agreement can be derailed by the presence of syntactically illicit nouns, a phenomenon called agreement attraction. By contrast, the incidence of agreement attraction with anaphoric dependencies is less clear: previous work has mostly focused on reflexives and strong pronouns, which sometimes show attraction and other times do not. Meanwhile, research on clitics—a different class of pronominal anaphora—is scarcer. To expand the empirical record, we examined clitic pronouns in an under-researched language, Bulgarian. The results of a large sample eye-tracking study showed clear agreement attraction effects in fixation durations and regressive eye movements to the clitic pronoun and following words. These findings provide further evidence that the variable attraction profile of anaphoric dependencies might depend on the features of an anaphoric element, including its placement and the role of syntactic constraints in establishing the antecedent-pronoun dependency.