Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement

Morphophonological influences on the construction of subject-verb agreement.

In three experiments, we investigated whether the production of subject-verb number agreement is affected by the phonological realization of grammatical information. Speakers repeated and completed German or Dutch noun phrases along the lines of The position against the demonstrations. We varied the number of the subject noun (position) and the local noun (demonstrations), as well as the number...

The emergence of creole subject-verb agreement

Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French.

This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent 'the boy(s) read(s)') where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-ve...

Hierarchy and scope of planning in subject-verb agreement production.

Two subject-verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun phrase (NP) stimuli consisting of a head NP follow...

Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers’ gender

An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker's gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations gener...