We tested toddlers’ and adults’ predictive use of English subject-verb agreement. Participants saw pairs of pictures differing in number and kind (e.g., one apple, two cookies), and heard sentences with a target noun naming one of the pictures. The target noun was the subject of a preceding agreeing verb in informative trials (e.g., Where are the good cookies?), but not in uninformative trials (Do you see the good cookies?). In Experiment 1, 3-year-olds and adults were faster and more likely to shift their gaze from distractor to target upon hearing an informative agreeing verb. In Experiment 2, 2.5-year-olds were faster to shift their gaze from distractor to target in response to the noun in informative trials, and were more likely to be fixating the target already at noun onset. Thus, toddlers used agreeing verbs to predict number features of an upcoming noun. These data provide strong new evidence for the broad scope of predictive processing in online language comprehension.

Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as the news anchor didn’t warn nobody about the floods (meaning “the news anchor warned nobody”), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as the news anchor didn’t warn anybody about the floods, are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in “Standard” or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors. To explore this question, and the relationship between NC and NPI constructions, we compared the acceptability of overtly negative noun phrases (e.g., nobody), NPIs (e.g., anybody), and bare plurals (e.g., people), in negative contexts and in conditionals. Negative items were followed by a consequence which supported their single negative meaning, while conditional items were followed by a consequence compatible with the NPI and the bare plural but not the negative noun phrase. Acceptability ratings of the critical NC sentences were reliably lower than constructions with NPIs and bare plurals, but the consequences for all three of these sentence types were rated highly. This reflects an asymmetry in participants’ acceptance of NC and their readiness to interpret it in context. A follow-up study with only conditionals revealed that speakers can also find NPIs infelicitous in conditional contexts with consequences that are compatible with a negative interpretation of the NPI, and that negative arguments are felicitous in these same contexts. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that speakers who do not accept NC have grammars that generate both NC and NPI constructions, and further, that these speakers have two underlying structures for any-NPIs in English.

This paper uses eye-tracking while reading to examine Standard English speakers’ processing of sentences with two syntactic negations: a negative auxiliary and either a negative subject (e.g., Nothing didn’t fall from the shelf) or a negative object (e.g., She didn’t answer nothing in that interview). Sentences were read in Double Negation (DN; the ‘she answered something’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) and Negative Concord (NC; the ‘she answered nothing’ reading of she didn’t answer nothing) biasing contexts. Despite the social stigma associated with NC, and linguistic assumptions that Standard English has a DN grammar, in which each syntactic negation necessarily contributes a semantic negation, our results show that Standard English speakers generate both NC and DN interpretations, and that their interpretation is affected by the syntactic structure of the negative sentence. Participants spent more time reading the critical sentence and rereading the context sentence when negative object sentences were paired with DN-biasing contexts and when negative subject sentences were paired with NC-biasing contexts. This suggests that, despite not producing NC, they find NC interpretations of negative object sentences easier to generate than DN interpretations. The results illustrate the utility of online measures when investigating socially stigmatized construction types.

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Natural languages frequently display both consistent and variable morphological patterns. Previous studies have indicated that variable morphological patterns are mastered more slowly than consistent ones. In particular, it has been argued that Chilean children, who are exposed to variable plural-marking, take longer to consistently associate the plural marker to a more-than-one interpretation than children who are exposed to non-variable plural-marking (e.g. children from Mexico City). Building on this previous work, the present study assesses Chilean children’s ability to associate the plural marker to a more-than-one interpretation in both an act-out task and an eye-tracking task, in order to compare performance across different contexts and between offline and real-time comprehension, and to enrich our understanding of the acquisition of variable morphology.