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Abstract

This paper examines the role of semantic factors in the production of subject-verb number agreement. As an ostensibly grammatical process, number agreement provides an interesting case for examining the flow and interaction of semantic and syntactic information through the language-production system. Using a sentence-completion task, agreement errors can be elicited from subjects by presenting them with sentence fragments containing a complex noun-phrase, in which the nonhead noun is plural (e.g., The key to the cabinets ... WERE missing.). Previous research has demonstrated that the probability of making an error can be affected by varying the properties of the nouns in the complex noun phrase. By investigating which variables do and do not affect error rates, constraints on the flow of information through the production system can be inferred. In three experiments, we investigated the possible effects of three different semantic manipulations of the nouns in the complex NP: animacy, semantic overlap, and plausibility of modification by the sentence predicate. We found that both animacy and semantic relatedness had reliable effects on error rates, indicating that the mechanism involved in implementing agreement cannot be blind to semantic information. However, the plausibility with which each noun could serve as the subject of the sentence predicate had no effect on error rates. Taken together, these results suggest that while semantic information is visible to the agreement mechanism, there are still constraints on when this information can affect the process. Specifically, it may be the case that only information contained within the complex NP is considered for the purposes of implementing agreement.

Encoding and Retrieval Interference in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence from Agreement

“…Since the distinction between definite description and pronoun is not cued by the verb, the facilitation effect of mismatch cannot lie in the cue-based retrieval process directed at satisfying the constraints of the verb. Similar results were obtained by Gordon et al (2002) and Fedorenko et al (2006) with a memory load paradigm and by Barker et al (2001) with a sentence-completion task on agreement attraction. Hence, even though the effect was detected at the critical retrieval region (i.e., the verb), it must reflect encoding interference.…”

“…To illustrate how this system generates encoding interference effects, we first describe its operation in a case related to the cases we report here. In the standard preamble continuation paradigm that Bock and Miller (1991) used to study agreement attraction, Barker et al (2001) found that participants were more likely to produce a plural verb in examples like (2a), where the subject head and the attractor share a fine-grained semantic feature (boat-hood) than (2b), where they do not.…”

“…Research in the memory domain has uncovered another critical source of similarity-based interference, which arises when the target element shares one (or more) features with other elements in memory. This situation is referred to as encoding interference (e.g., classical spatial and word list studies: Oberauer and Kliegl, 2006 ; Oberauer and Lange, 2008 ; sentence processing studies: Barker et al, 2001 ; Gordon et al, 2001 , 2004 ; Hofmeister and Vasishth, 2014 ; Kush et al, 2015 ) and, unlike retrieval interference, arises regardless of whether the overlapping feature is a retrieval cue. One possible mechanism that has been proposed to account for encoding interference is feature overwriting , which assumes feature competition amongst similar elements in memory, such that the element losing the competition results in a degraded memory representation ( Nairne, 1990 , 2002 ; Oberauer and Kliegl, 2006 ).…”

Keeping it simple: studying grammatical encoding with lexically reduced item sets

“…To limit the number of invalid responses, later studies have restricted the ways in which participants could complete the sentences. For instance, participants were presented with adjectives or past participles (e.g., old or broken ) that had to be used in the completion together with an inflected form of to be , which increased the number of analyzable responses (Vigliocco et al, 1996; Barker et al, 2001; Haskell and MacDonald, 2003; Hartsuiker and Barkhuysen, 2006; Brehm and Bock, 2013; Veenstra et al, 2014a). Other studies encouraged the use of forms of to be by presenting infinitive verbs that had to be used in passive constructions (Hartsuiker et al, 2001), or verb stems to be used in perfect tense constructions (Thornton and MacDonald, 2003), or by simply instructing participants to use to be (Franck et al, 2002).…”

“…First, in spite of the substantial body of work on agreement, there are still many unresolved issues (for recent reviews see Bock and Middleton, 2011; Gillespie and Pearlmutter, 2011), some of which might fruitfully be addressed using lexically simple and uniform materials. Though the generation of subject-verb agreement is a grammatical process based on the number assigned to the subject noun phrase, speakers’ decisions are affected by morpho-phonological, semantic, and pragmatic variables as well (e.g., Barker et al, 2001; Hartsuiker et al, 2003; Haskell and MacDonald, 2003; Thornton and MacDonald, 2003; Solomon and Pearlmutter, 2004; Brehm and Bock, 2013; Veenstra et al, 2014a). When such variables are not of interest, it might be advisable to minimize their influence on people’s behavior by using simple and uniform materials.…”