No abstract

We report an experiment in which we test the relationship between gender and number in subject-predicate agreement. We also test the link between two different number-agreement relations-subject-verb and subject-predicative adjective. Participants saw first an unmarked adjective and then a sentence fragment consisting of a complex subject with a head noun and a modifier containing a second noun and were asked to make a whole sentence using the adjective with the proper gender and number markings. The gender of the subject head and the gender and number of the attractor noun were manipulated. Number errors in the verb and number and gender errors in the predicative adjective were measured. The results suggest gender agreement is computed independently of number agreement. In contrast, subject-verb number agreement and subject-predicative adjective number agreement are a unitary process. The implications for psycholinguistic and linguistic theories of gender and number are discussed.

No abstract

Language production theories differ in their assumptions about the information flow between levels. Serial models hypothesize that different types of information, such as conceptual factors and morphophonological make up, would have an effect at different points during the implementation of agreement and would, therefore, not interact. Constraint-based models, on the other hand, entail an interplay of these two types of factors. Here, we present data from an experiment designed to test whether a conceptual factor (notional number) interacts with a morphophonological factor (determiner number ambiguity) resulting in an increased number of subject-verb agreement errors in Dutch. Analyses showed main effects of both factors but no interaction. We also carried out simulations of one specific serial model for production of subject-verb number agreement, the Marking and Morphing model (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005). Our simulations in Dutch yielded an excellent fit between the model and these data (as well as other previously collected data). In conclusion, our results argue in favour of independent processing of these two types of information during agreement production and, more specifically, offer support for the Marking and Morphing model.