An investigation of the dependency of subject-verb agreement on inhibitory control processes in sentence production

Abstract

Agreement attraction, i.e., the production or acceptance of a verb that agrees with a noun other than the subject of the sentence, can be viewed as a process in which conflicting cues activate competing representations. The aftermath of such competition, in terms of cognitive processes, remains unclear. Using a novel referential communication task for eliciting agreement errors and both group-level manipulation of control demands and a detailed analysis of individual differences, we provide converging evidence for the role of monitoring and inhibitory control processes in agreement attraction for singular-subject sentences. We further demonstrate the dependence of producing plural verbs on such processes, suggesting the singular form is the prepotent default form. Collectively, these findings provide a clear demonstration for the role of monitoring and control processes in agreement computations, and more generally syntactic operations in sentence production.

A review of the anatomy and function of the white matter tracts in language production and comprehension

“…Similarly, syntax encompasses a wide range of operations, some but not all of which require maintaining long-distance dependencies and reconciling competition between alternative representations, which may reflect more domain-general abilities rather than syntactic processes per se (e.g., Nozari & Omaki, 2022). Most studies of syntactic processing have not attempted to carefully disentangle these facets of processing.…”

Number attraction in verb and anaphor production

“…Paralleling the observations made in preamble experiments, found that participants made more errors in the mismatch conditions (SP, PS) than the match conditions (SS, PP) and saw evidence of the markedness effect (this effect was manifested as stronger attraction in the SP condition than the PS condition rather than an absence of attraction in the PS condition). Nozari and Omaki (2022) also observed classic verb attraction effects in a similar picture description paradigm. In their experiment, participants saw slides displaying multiple groups of multicolored animals; each group contained two different animal types, with one or two animals of each type.…”

“…This need for disambiguation provided a natural motivation for participants to produce the desired sentence structure. Nozari and Omaki (2022) observed more errors in the mismatch conditions, with evidence of a markedness effect similar to . and Nozari and Omaki (2022) thus provide evidence that verb attraction can be observed in more naturalistic production paradigms in addition to the traditional preamble paradigm.…”

“…Nozari and Omaki (2022) observed more errors in the mismatch conditions, with evidence of a markedness effect similar to . and Nozari and Omaki (2022) thus provide evidence that verb attraction can be observed in more naturalistic production paradigms in addition to the traditional preamble paradigm. To our knowledge, no prior studies have applied such description paradigms to elicit reflexive pronoun agreement.…”

“…Experiment 1 contained no filler trials; there was little need to conceal the primary task from participants, and fillers may have made it harder for participants to successfully produce the target structures. Furthermore, Nozari and Omaki (2022) demonstrated that a similar task without filler trials was successful in eliciting verb attraction errors. The order of the 96 target sentences was pseudorandomized in four lists.…”