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Related Experiment Videos

Broken agreement.

K Bock1, C A Miller

  • 1Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing 48824-1117.

Cognitive Psychology
|January 1, 1991
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Number agreement errors in English sentences occur when the local noun phrase

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Syntactic Processing
  • Language Production

Background:

  • Subject-verb number agreement is a fundamental aspect of English syntax.
  • Agreement errors, like 'The cost of the improvements have...', occur despite fluent language production.
  • Current research questions the interplay between semantic and syntactic factors in sentence construction.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if semantic features of preverbal nouns influence subject-verb agreement errors.
  • To explore the role of noun number, animacy, and intervening material in agreement errors.
  • To test theories on the modularity versus interactivity of language processing components.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted using sentence completion tasks.

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  • Participants were prompted to complete sentence fragments designed to elicit agreement errors.
  • Variables manipulated included the number and animacy of the head noun and local noun, and the distance to the verb.

    • Main Results:

    • The plurality of the noun phrase immediately preceding the verb significantly increased agreement errors.
    • The animacy and length of the local noun phrase did not affect the rate of errors.
    • Intervening material between the subject and verb did not influence error occurrence.

    Conclusions:

    • Semantic features of sentence subjects appear minimally relevant to syntactic agreement processes.
    • Agreement is likely determined early in processing, before sentence length is finalized.
    • Findings support models of language production with segregated, autonomous processing components.