Constructing Subject-Verb Agreement in Speech: The Role of Semantic and Morphological Factors

Vigliocco, Gabriella; Butterworth, Brian; Semenza, Carlo

doi:10.1006/jmla.1995.1009

Cited by 197 publications

(260 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Consistent with previous work on agreement attraction that has identified an asymmetry between number features in determining agreement attraction (Bock & Miller 1991;Bock & Eberhard 1993;Vigliocco et al 1995;1996;Vigliocco & Nicol 1998;Bock et al 2001;Hartsuiker et al 2003;Alcocer & Phillips 2009;Bock et al 2012;Acuña-Fariña et al 2014;Jegerski 2016), we found that native speakers of Spanish exhibit clear effects of attraction for number: ungrammatical sentences with a singular NP1 but plural NP2 and ADJ were rated higher than other cases of ungrammaticality. Also consistent with the previous literature, we failed to find evidence of attraction for gender.…”

supporting

confidence: 91%

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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This paper investigates the morphosyntax of number and gender agreement in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish. Our study builds on the experimental paradigm of agreement attraction developed by Fuchs et al. (2015) and elicits responses to agreement failures to diagnose the potentially-independent contributions of number and gender features. By comparing the structuring of these agreement categories in native and heritage Spanish, we document a case of grammatical divergence: heritage speakers restructure their agreement categories, favoring fewer feature values and less structure. The principled nature of this restructuring demonstrates that the loss of agreement in heritage languages is not superficial or accidental, but rather follows from predictable structural changes.

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supporting

confidence: 91%

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

Scontras

Polinsky

Fuchs

2018

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…(9) *Siamo una squadra che giochiamo We are a team-S that play-P (10) *C'est ce genre de texte qui sont très subtils It's this-S kind-S of text-S that are-P very subtle A number of experiments have investigated agreement phenomena in language production by looking at errors in the agreement of number between the sentential subject and the verb, as in examples (9) and (10) (Bock & Miller, 1991;Bock & Cutting, 1992;Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Fayol, Largy, & Lemaire, 1994;Eberhard, 1997;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996a;Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, & Kolk, 1996b). Errors were induced by presenting speakers with sentential fragments such as "The king of the colonies.…”

Section: Agreement In Models Of Sentence Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(11) The baby on the blankets (12) The label on the bottles Errors in agreement of number were found to be more common in Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish when the subject head noun was conceptually plural (as in 12) than when it was conceptually singular (as in 11), indicating that agreement can be influenced by conceptual numerosity in these languages (Vigliocco et al, 1995;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996a;Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema & Kolk, 1996b). However, this effect has not been reported in English (Bock & Miller, 1991;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996a).…”

Section: Agreement In Models Of Sentence Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both French and Italian have a nominal gender system that includes a distinction between nouns reflecting the sex of the referent (conceptual gender) and nouns for which the gender does not reflect the sex of the referent (grammatical gender). The experiments used a constrained sentence completion task (Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). In Experiments 1 (Italian) and 2 (French) we found that errors in the agreement of gender between the subject and the predicate were more common when the subject head noun did not have any conceptual correlates.…”

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confidence: 97%

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When Sex and Syntax Go Hand in Hand: Gender Agreement in Language Production

Vigliocco

Franck

1999

Journal of Memory and Language

139

179

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In four experiments (two in French and two in Italian), we investigated whether the language production system uses conceptual information regarding biological gender in the encoding of gender agreement between a subject and a predicate. Both French and Italian have a nominal gender system that includes a distinction between nouns reflecting the sex of the referent (conceptual gender) and nouns for which the gender does not reflect the sex of the referent (grammatical gender). The experiments used a constrained sentence completion task (Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). In Experiments 1 (Italian) and 2 (French) we found that errors in the agreement of gender between the subject and the predicate were more common when the subject head noun did not have any conceptual correlates. Experiments 3 and 4 established that the advantage for conceptual gender in the first two studies cannot be explained by the difference in animacy between nouns with conceptual gender (referring to humans and animals) and nouns with grammatical gender (referring to objects).

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“…A robust syntactic influence is the attraction from a local noun that is located between the head noun of a subject phrase and the inflected verb. Attraction-typically studied with sentence completion tasks-occurs when a plural local noun follows a singular subject head noun, increasing the chance for the verb to obtain an incorrect plural inflection (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing; Bock & Miller, 1991, see also Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Bock, Eberhard, Cutting, Meyer, & Schriefers, 2001;Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002;Haskell, Thornton, & MacDonald, 2010;Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995). To a lesser extent the same occurs for plural head nouns combined with singular local nouns (Eberhard, 1997;Veenstra, Acheson, & Meyer, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of parallel planning on agreement production

2015

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a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oAn important issue in current psycholinguistics is how the time course of utterance planning affects the generation of grammatical structures. The current study investigated the influence of parallel activation of the components of complex noun phrases on the generation of subject-verb agreement. Specifically, the lexical interference account (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b;Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004) predicts more agreement errors (i.e., attraction) for subject phrases in which the head and local noun mismatch in number (e.g., the apple next to the pears) when nouns are planned in parallel than when they are planned in sequence. We used a speeded picture description task that yielded sentences such as the apple next to the pears is red. The objects mentioned in the noun phrase were either semantically related or unrelated. To induce agreement errors, pictures sometimes mismatched in number. In order to manipulate the likelihood of parallel processing of the objects and to test the hypothesized relationship between parallel processing and the rate of agreement errors, the pictures were either placed close together or far apart. Analyses of the participants' eye movements and speech onset latencies indicated slower processing of the first object and stronger interference from the related (compared to the unrelated) second object in the close than in the far condition. Analyses of the agreement errors yielded an attraction effect, with more errors in mismatching than in matching conditions. However, the magnitude of the attraction effect did not differ across the close and far conditions. Thus, spatial proximity encouraged parallel processing of the pictures, which led to interference of the associated conceptual and/or lexical representation, but, contrary to the prediction, it did not lead to more attraction errors.

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Constructing Subject-Verb Agreement in Speech: The Role of Semantic and Morphological Factors

Cited by 197 publications

References 8 publications

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

In support of representational economy: Agreement in heritage Spanish

When Sex and Syntax Go Hand in Hand: Gender Agreement in Language Production

Effects of parallel planning on agreement production

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