Against structural constraints in subject-verb agreement production.
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.
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. mgillesp@illinois.edu
Maureen
M
Gillespie
Neal J
NJ
Pearlmutter
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics; D013334:Students; D014495:Universities; D014705:Verbal Behavior