The Ties That Bind: Creating Number Agreement in Speech

Bock, Kathryn; Nicol, Janet; Cutting, John

doi:10.1006/jmla.1998.2616

Cited by 148 publications

(232 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…A possible case of verification identified in linguistics is feature matching between antecedent and anaphor (or bound pronoun), where the binder and the bindee must have matching features, but there is presumably no copying procedure involved. Bock, Nicol, and Cutting (1999) reported attraction effects in such structures (15), similar in size to attraction in verb agreement (16).…”

Section: How Does Attraction Come About?mentioning

confidence: 71%

Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

et al. 2006

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This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a word that is not the subject of the sentence). Experiment 1 (in Italian) shows that subject modifiers do not trigger attraction errors in free inverted VS (Verb Subject) structures, although attraction was found in VS interrogatives in English (Vigliocco, G., & Nicol, J. (1998). Separating hierarchical relations and word order in language production. Is proximity concord syntactic or linear? Cognition, 13-29) In Experiment 2 (in French), we report stronger attraction with preverbal clitic object pronouns than with subject modifiers. Experiment 3 (in French) shows that displaced direct objects in the cleft construction trigger attraction effects, in spite of the fact that the object does not intervene between the subject and the verb in the surface word order (OSV). Moreover, attraction is stronger in structures with subject-verb inversion (...). These observations are shown to be naturally interpretable through the tools of formal syntax, as elaborated within the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist tradition. Three important constructs are discussed: (1) the hierarchical representation of the sentence during syntactic construction, and the role of intermediate positions by which words transit when they move; (2) the role of specific hierarchical (c-command) but also linear (precedence) relations; and (3) complexity in agreement is presented which relates empirical evidence to these theoretical constructs. q

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Section: How Does Attraction Come About?mentioning

confidence: 71%

Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

et al. 2006

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“…Bock & Cutting, 1992;Bock & Eberhard, 1993;Bock & Miller, 1991;Bock, Nicol, & Cutting, 1999;Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998;Bock et al, 2001;Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002). Subject -verb agreement is assumed to be computed at the stage of grammatical encoding (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), after the sentence has been conceptually elaborated, but before word forms are specified.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

Franck

Cronel-Ohayon

Chillier

et al. 2004

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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We report a study on the spoken production of subject -verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting 'local noun'. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships. q

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“…As point of departure, we note that recent psycholinguistic studies on number agreement (e.g. Bock et al 1999) and gender agreement (e.g. Vigliocco and Franck 2001) suggest that the corresponding agreement processes can be a¤ected by semantic-conceptual information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Disagreement on agreement: person agreement between coordinated subjects and verbs in Dutch and German

Timmermans¹,

Schriefers²,

Dijkstra³

et al. 2004

Linguistics

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Native speakers of Dutch and German reliably know how to combine the person features of a coordination of two singular elements into a new plural person feature. For example, a phrase like jij en de jongen (you [2nd singular] and the boy) becomes jullie (you [2nd plural]). However, anecdotal evidence suggests that despite this knowledge, speakers of Dutch and German have a strong tendency to treat the whole compound subject as 3rd person plural when computing person agreement between such a compound subject and a verb. In two language production experiments, we obtained results confirming this anecdotal evidence. Furthermore, the results show that the use of 3rd person plural verbs does not depend on the order in which the 2nd and 3rd person elements occur in the compound subject (e.g. jij en de jongen vs. de jongen en jij). The results are interpreted in a framework assuming two alternative computational procedures for person agreement, a purely syntactic procedure and a conceptual-semantic procedure.

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The Ties That Bind: Creating Number Agreement in Speech

Cited by 148 publications

References 25 publications

Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

Disagreement on agreement: person agreement between coordinated subjects and verbs in Dutch and German

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