The resolution of number conflicts in English and German agreement patterns

The linguistics and psycholinguistics of agreement: A tutorial overview

“…There is evidence in the processing literature that at least in languages with rich inflectional systems like Italian or Spanish, the processing of redundant marks of agreement is fast and shallow, in the sense that it appears to be automatic and relatively immune from semantic interference. Berg (1998) suggests that in morphologically impoverished languages like English, low frequency of agreement operations makes for a weak morphosyntactic component that is unable to keep semantic interference at bay, at least in production. Since the storing of gender features and the on-line computation of those features in 'phrase construction' (Hawkins, 1994(Hawkins, , 2004 are two different things, another interesting aspect of the processing of agreement is how word access and phrase construction interact, especially how they do so in different languages like Spanish and English, with different morphosyntax.…”

“…However, linguists and psycholinguists disagree as to whether this core process is essentially a semantic or a syntactic phenomenon, and there is evidence that suggests that it may be both things at the same time. Berg (1998) suggests that in morphologically impoverished languages like English, low frequency of agreement operations makes for a weak morphosyntactic component that is unable to keep semantic interference at bay, at least in production (where meaning comes first). In his completion study, he manages to show that the strong morphosyntactic defences of German do seem to encapsulate number agreement from non-formal forces.…”

The Accessibility of Conceptual Number to the Processes of Subject–Verb Agreement in English

“…In contrast, Berg (1998) suggested that the impoverished verbal morphology in English increases the influence of conceptual number on verb agreement. His suggestion was based on a comparison of verb agreement in British English with verb agreement in German, which has a richer inflectional system.…”

Agreement in specificational sentences in Faroese

“…German, and Dutch (Berg 1998, Fischer 2003. However, because a fill-in-theblanks task is a type of production task, and does not give a direct answer to whether a non-produced form is ungrammatical or simply dispreferred, I also conducted a judgment exercise with six speakers on Sandoy, using the experimental paradigm of magnitude estimation.…”