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Agreement is one of the main devices used by languages to signal grammatical relations. In this study, we investigated the neurophysiological processing correlates of subject-verb agreement in Spanish using Unagreement, a phenomenon characterized by a person mismatch between subject and verb that nonetheless produces a grammatical pattern. Unagreement was compared to well-formed sentences with full agreement, and ill-formed sentences with a person mismatch. Compared to control sentences, Unagreement produced a left posterior negativity followed by a more central negativity; no P600 effect was observed. In contrast, person violations generated a negativity that was widely distributed over the scalp, followed by a P600 effect. These data suggest that the comprehension of qualitatively different agreement patterns, which could reflect the performance of different processing routines, recruits different neural generators.

Existing psycholinguistic models typically describe agreement relations as monolithic phenomena amounting to mechanisms that check mere feature consistency. This eye-tracking study aimed at widening this perspective by investigating the time spent reading subject-verb (number, person) and adverb-verb (tense) violations on an inflected verb during sentence comprehension in Spanish. Results suggest that (i) distinct processing mechanisms underlie the analysis of subject-verb and adverb-verb relations, (ii) the parser is sensitive to the different interpretive properties that characterize the person, number and tense features encoded in the verb (i.e. anchoring to discourse for person and tense interpretation, as opposed to anchoring to cardinality information for number), and (iii) the (local, distal) position of the agreement controller with respect to the verb affects the interpretation of these dependencies. An account is proposed that capitalizes on the importance of enriching current sentence processing formalizations using a feature and relation-based approach.

Most linguistic theories of language offer analysis of agreement describing the rules and constraints involved in the computation and interpretation of this dependency. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is mismatching patterns. In this article we focus on a mismatch available in the Spanish agreement system -Unagreement -in which there is a person mismatch in the realization of plural subject-verb agreement. Unagreement seems to challenge both purely syntactic and lexicalist analyses of agreement, as the realization of this pattern cannot be carried out either on a strictly formal basis or by simply postulating a lexically-driven asymmetry. We propose an approach that overcomes the limitations of existing analyses and that is able to successfully account for standard as well as non-standard agreement patterns. The Mechanics of AgreementAs language comprehenders, we are constantly and unconsciously absorbed in the process of decoding language and its meaning, linking actors to their respective actions and also to real-world entities. Doing this requires careful unpacking of the linguistic input, in search of grammatical cues that give the reader ⁄ hearer fundamental coordinates concerning the participants in discourse: what is their role, their number, and whether they are animate or inanimate, female or masculine. This function is carried out by agreement features, morphological categories that signal the person, number and gender information associated with nouns, pronouns, verbs, articles and adjectives. Feature consistency between these different parts of speech is what gives rise to an agreement relation.The realization of agreement entails displacing person, number and gender information from the controller (e.g. a subject argument) to the target (e.g. a verb) of the relation. Across languages, the amount and the type of controller-to-target information displacement can however vary, as shown in (1) below, where the agreement ''richness'' of Romance languages contrasts with the ''poverty'' of the system in English.(1) I pl.m linguisti 3.pl.m. scrivono 3.pl articoli pl.m interessanti m.pl ITALIAN Los m.pl lingüístas 3.pl.m. escriben 3.pl artículos pl.m interesantes m.pl SPANISH Les m.pl linguistes 3.pl.m ecrivent 3.pl des articles pl.m interesants pl.m FRENCH Linguists 3.pl.ø write 3.pl interesting ø articles pl.ø. ENGLISH Formalizing the mechanics of agreement essentially amounts to describing the way features are structured and accessed by the system and how agreement information flows along the structure. Most theories of language offer their own account of agreement, describing the rules or constraints involved in the realization and interpretation of this relation. Broadly speaking, two main influential approaches to agreement can be Language and Linguistics Compass 7/1 (2013):

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Agreement is a syntactic relation involving e.g. matching nouns and verbs. It is unclear if verbal morphology depends on the noun or is independent. We manipulated the semantic markedness of nominal and verbal inflection in Basque. ERPs show that interpretation is influenced by the position of marked morphology. Findings point to verbal morphology as syntactically independent.

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