Against Structural Constraints in Subject-Verb Agreement Production

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 515 - 528
• Main Authors: Gillespie, Maureen, Pearlmutter, Neal J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01.03.2013
• Subjects: Analysis of Variance; Error Analysis (Language); Female; Form Classes (Languages); Grammar; Humans; Language; Language Processing; Language Research; Linear Models; Male; Mental Recall - physiology; Morphemes; Nouns; Phrase Structure; Psycholinguistics - methods; Recall (Psychology); Reference Values; Role; Scoring; Semantics; Speech Communication; Statistical Analysis; Structural Analysis (Linguistics); Students; Syntax; Undergraduate Students; Universities; Verbal Behavior; Verbs
• ISSN: 0278-7393; 1939-1285; 1939-1285
• DOI: 10.1037/a0029005

Syntactic structure has been considered an integral component of agreement computation in language production. In agreement error studies, clause-boundedness (Bock & Cutting, 1992) and hierarchical feature-passing (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002) predict that local nouns within clausal modifiers should produce fewer errors than do those within phrasal modifiers due to structural differences; however, Gillespie and Pearlmutter (2011b) suggested structure might play a more limited role. Two studies examined whether the clause-boundedness effect would occur when prepositional phrase modifiers and relative clause modifiers were matched in properties likely to influence the timing of planning (Gillespie & Pearlmutter, 2011b; Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). In both studies, more errors occurred for plural local nouns, but the clause-boundedness effect was not observed. These findings suggest that agreement computation during production does not involve a hierarchical component. (Contains 6 tables, 2 figures, and 5 footnotes.)