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A robust result in research on the production of grammatical agreement is that speakers are more likely to produce an erroneous verb with phrases such as the key to the cabinets, with a singular noun followed by a plural one, than with phrases such as the keys to the cabinet, where a plural noun is followed by a singular. These asymmetries are thought to reflect core language production processes. Previous accounts have attributed error patterns to a syntactic number feature present on plurals but not singulars. An alternative approach is presented in which a process similar to structural priming contributes to the error asymmetry via speakers' past experiences with related agreement constructions. A corpus analysis and two agreement production studies test this account. The results suggest that agreement production is shaped by statistical learning from past language experience. Implications for accounts of agreement are discussed.Research in language production aims to explain how people can translate a thought into a spoken, signed, or written utterance. Much of this research has theorized about the architectural properties of the language production system that make possible this mapping from thought to language (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994). More recently, production researchers have begun to address the role of learning in the language production process. One such line of research involves the role of structural priming (or syntactic persistence), which refers to speakers' tendencies to use sentence structures that have been uttered or perceived in the recent past. The effects of structural priming are most clearly observable when a speaker has a choice between two alternative structures, e.g., a prepositional dative (The author gave a book to the library) or a double-object dative (The author gave the library a book). If the speaker has recently produced a prepositional dative sentence (e.g., The man read a story to the boy), that speaker is more likely to utter a prepositional dative than if a double-object dative (e.g., The man read the boy a story) has recently been produced (Bock, 1986). Although these effects are sometimes described in terms of short-term spreading activation (e.g., Pickering & Branigan, 1998), the effects can be relatively long-lasting, and it has been suggested that they are at least partly due to implicit learning of past utterances, possibly in addition to a transient activation-based mechanism Chang, Dell, Bock, & Griffin, 2000;Ferreira & Bock, 2006).Another line of research to focus on learning mechanisms concerns the causes of speech errors in production. Dell, Reed, Adams, and Meyer (2000) noted that speech errors are typically constrained to follow the phonotactics of whatever language is being used. For example, an NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCognition. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 February 1. Published in final edited form as:Cognition. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptEnglish speaker would be unlikely to pr...

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A number of studies have shown that structural factors play a much larger role than the linear order of words during the production of grammatical agreement. These findings have been used as evidence for a stage in the production process at which hierarchical relations between constituents have been established (a necessary precursor to agreement), but before the final linear order of words is determined. The current article combines evidence from off-line ratings, online production studies, and a corpus analysis in support of the view that linear order effects do exist. These findings have implications both for theories of agreement production and language production more generally.