Subject-verb agreement in children and adults: serial or hierarchical processing?
Two processes, serial and hierarchical, are generally opposed to account for grammatical encoding in language production. In a developmental perspective, the question addressed here is whether the subject-verb agreement during writing is computed serially, once the words are linearly ordered in the sentence, or hierarchically, as soon as the number features are determined in a hierarchical frame. Adults and children from 3rd to 5th grades were requested to listen to sentences with built-in prepositional phrases or relative clauses and to transcribe them as quickly as possible. A serial hypothesis assumes that subject-verb agreement errors should be equally frequent with both preambles because each has the same length separating the subject head noun and the main verb. Conversely, according to a hierarchical view, errors should be more frequent with a prepositional phrase because the syntactic distance between the subject and the verb is greater than with a relative clause. The results revealed a main effect of the preamble manipulated in 5th graders and adults, but not in 3rd graders. These data were in favor of a hierarchical processing in older writers and a serial one in younger children. However, in 3rd grade, we assumed that the potential serial account was a result of the resource constraint on writing more than of a real serial processing of the agreement.
Negro
Isabelle
I
Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université Antilles-Guyane, Martinique, B.P. 7207, 97275 Schoelcher, France. Isabelle.Negro@martinique.univ-ag.fr
Chanquoy
Lucile
L
Fayol
Michel
M
Louis-Sidney
Maryse
M
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D014705:Verbal Behavior