The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

Lorimor, Heidi; Jackson, Carrie N.; Spalek, Katharina; Hell, Janet G. van

doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1136426

Cited by 15 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Subject-verb agreement anomalies. Errors in subject-verb number agreement have been extensively studied in production, using sentence completion paradigms (e.g., Bock & Miller, 1991;Brehm & Bock, 2017;Lorimor, Jackson, Spalek, & van Hell, 2016), and in comprehension, using reading studies and measures of sentence misinterpretations (e.g., Patson & Husband, 2016;Pearlmutter, Garnsey, & Bock, 1999;Wagers, Lau, & Phillips, 2009). The basic finding is that in production, singular heads with plural local (intervening) nouns elicit more number-marking errors on the verb (productions of 1a vs 1b, conventionally correct) than do comparable items with singular local nouns (productions of 1c vs 1d).…”

Section: Speaker-specific Anomaly Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances

Brehm

Jackson

Miller

2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Existing work shows that readers often interpret grammatical errors (e.g., The key to the cabinets *were shiny) and sentence-level blends ("without-blend": Claudia left without her headphones *off) in a non-literal fashion, inferring that a more frequent or more canonical utterance was intended instead. This work examines how interlocutor identity affects the processing and interpretation of anomalous sentences. We presented anomalies in the context of "emails" attributed to various writers in a self-paced reading paradigm and used comprehension questions to probe how sentence interpretation changed based upon properties of the item and properties of the "speaker." Experiment 1 compared standardised American English speakers to L2 English speakers; Experiment 2 compared the same standardised English speakers to speakers of a non-Standardised American English dialect. Agreement errors and without-blends both led to more non-literal responses than comparable canonical items. For agreement errors, more non-literal interpretations also occurred when sentences were attributed to speakers of Standardised American English than either non-Standardised group. These data suggest that understanding sentences relies on expectations and heuristics about which utterances are likely. These are based upon experience with language, with speaker-specific differences, and upon more general cognitive biases.

show abstract

Section: Speaker-specific Anomaly Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances

Brehm

Jackson

Miller

2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Her research shows that English speakers produce more singular agreement with conjoined noun phrases that are of low individuation. The same pattern has been found in Dutch and German number agreement with conjoined noun phrases (Lorimor et al 2016). Lorimor (2007) argues that this effect has to do with notional number; she showed with speaker ratings that mass nouns and abstract noun phrase conjunctions are more likely to be perceived as a single mass without boundaries.…”

Section: The Individuation Hierarchy: Conjunct Semantics and Agreemenmentioning

confidence: 53%

“…I argue that the neuter singular agreement with conjoined noun phrases in the data should be seen as semantic default agreement that is triggered by referents of low individuationcomparable to Scandinavian pancake agreement (Enger 2004;, singular agreement based on notional number in English, Dutch, and German (Lorimor 2007;Lorimor et al 2016), generic neuter singular with indefinite mass nouns in Faroese (Petersen 2009), as well as the semantically motivated use of neuter singular in pronominal agreement with referents of low individuation in e.g. Dutch and German (Audring 2009;Kraaikamp 2017).…”

Section: Neuter Singular As Semantic Agreementmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Some referents -regardless of their grammatical number -can be considered more notionally singular, while others are more notionally plural (see e.g. Lorimor 2007;Bock et al 2012;Brehm & Bock 2013;Lorimor et al 2016). Lorimor (2007) researched agreement with conjoined noun phrases in English according to noun types and found semantic effects on agreement choices, both in a corpus study and with experiments on agreement production.…”

Section: The Individuation Hierarchy: Conjunct Semantics and Agreemenmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Agreement with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic

Þorvaldsdóttir

2019

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents results from a study on agreement with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic. A survey was conducted to elicit agreement choices on two agreement targets (predicate adjectives and personal pronouns) with agreement controllers from four individuation levels (human, animal, countable object, uncountable abstract). The aim was to provide an overview of the strategies for determining agreement with conjoined noun phrases in Icelandic, and examine whether two typological hierarchies-the Agreement Hierarchy and the Individuation Hierarchy-can predict the distribution of agreement options. This research identifies and examines five different agreement strategies with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic. The distribution of these patterns in relation to the two hierarchies is evaluated with the aim of discerning what influences agreement choices. Both typological hierarchies are shown to affect the choice of agreement strategies. In addition to discussing semantic resolution, syntactic resolution, and partial agreement in Icelandic-this paper identifies and argues for two types of neuter default agreement. The first is neuter plural, a fixed value for agreement with conjoined noun phrases, and the second is neuter singular: semantic default agreement triggered by referents that are low on the Individuation Hierarchy. This research presents new data that has implications for the understanding of agreement with conjoined noun phrases and the function of neuter in Icelandic and related languages.

show abstract

“…Research has shown that these errors are not dependent on surface properties such as proximity (Bock & Cutting, 1992;Franck et al, 2002;Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004;Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998) or phonological properties of the plural (Bock & Eberhard, 1993). Instead, these errors are particularly sensitive to syntactic manipulations (Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Franck et al, 2002;Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998), although they can also be affected by other more conceptual or semantic factors (e.g., Lorimor, Jackson, Spalek, & van Hell, 2016;Thornton & MacDonald, 2003;Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, & Kolk, 1996). A critical characteristic of these errors is their asymmetry: They occur more often when the subject head is singular and the attractor noun is plural (e.g., "the key to the cabinets") than when both nouns have the same number (e.g., "the key to the cabinet" and "the keys to the cabinets") or when the head is plural and the attractor noun singular (e.g., "the keys to the cabinet").…”

Section: Attraction Errors In Subject-verb Agreementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm

2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject‐verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., “the owner(s) of the house(s) is/are away”). In the general population, attraction errors are not straightforwardly dependent on the presence or absence of morphophonological plural markers but on their syntactic configuration. The same would be expected for dyslexic children if their syntactic problems are not phonological in nature. We also looked at the possible effect of system overload on syntactic processing by comparing auditory and written presentation of stimuli and stimuli with high and low frequency attractors. Dyslexic children produced more agreement errors than age‐matched controls, but their errors were distributed in the expected manner and did not align with the presence of morphophonological number markers in the subject overall. Furthermore, there was no effect of either presentation mode or attractor frequency on the number of agreement errors. Our results confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that they are not due to a phonological deficit or to verbal working memory limitations.

show abstract

The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

Cited by 15 publications

References 28 publications

Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances

Speaker-specific processing of anomalous utterances

Agreement with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic

Independence of syntactic and phonological deficits in dyslexia: A study using the attraction error paradigm

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About