Children's production of subject-verb agreement: The effect of conceptual number

Ming-Wei Ernest Lee
University of Cambridge

Emma Brown and Carmel Wolverson
Anglia Polytechnic University

Many domains of language processing require the co-ordination of syntactic and non-syntactic information. Recently, studies have begun to appear that chart the development of the use of multiple sources of information in sentence comprehension in children. A major finding of these developmental studies is that children do not take non-syntactic
information into account when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities. For example, Traxler (2002) has found that 8- to 12-year-olds are unable to use semantic plausibility information to avoid or revise syntactic misanalyses. The present study investigates whether children's non-use of semantic information extends to subject-verb agreement production, another domain of language processing that has been argued to involve the co-ordination of syntactic and semantic/conceptual information (e.g., Eberhard, 1999).

It is now generally accepted that production of subject-verb agreement in English is affected by the conceptual number of the subject NP: adult native speakers of English are more likely to produce a number agreement error on the verb immediately following a complex subject NP when the head and 'local' nouns of the subject NP mismatch in number and the referent of the subject NP is conceptually plural ((d), compared to (c)) than when there is a number mismatch and the referent of the subject NP is conceptually singular ((b), compared to (a)).

a The key to the cabinet (Head/Local Match)
b The key to the cabinets (Head/Local Mismatch, conceptually singular)
c The label on the bottle (Head/Local Match)
d The label on the bottles (Head/Local Mismatch, conceptually plural)

One explanation of this effect is that the computation of verb agreement involves a constraint satisfaction process in which multiple sources of information (including conceptual information) are integrated (e.g., Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002; but see Bock et al., 2001 for a different account). The present study investigates the use/non-use of conceptual information in agreement computation by children by examining whether the effect of conceptual number on agreement production can be found in 10-year-olds. A group of 10-year-olds and a group of university students (aged 19 or more) were tested on subject NPs like (a) to (d) in a spoken sentence completion task. The results showed that conceptually plural NPs elicited
more agreement errors than conceptually singular NPs in both groups. Further analyses of the data revealed that if anything, the 10-year-olds' agreement production was more influenced by the conceptual number of subject NPs than the adults'. We shall discuss why semantic/conceptual information appears to be more readily used by children in agreement
production than in sentence comprehension, and consider an obvious question that the present data beg, namely, whether children younger than those tested in this study would show no effect of conceptual number on agreement production.

References

Bock, J.K., Eberhard, K.M., Cutting, J.C., Meyer, A.S., & Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83-128.

Eberhard, K.M. (1999). The accessibility of conceptual number to the processes of subject-verb agreement in English. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 560-578.

Traxler, M. (2002). Plausibility and subcategorization preference in children's processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences: Evidence from self-paced reading. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55A, 75-96.

Vigliocco, G., & Hartsuiker, R.J. (2002). The interplay of meaning, sound and syntax in language production. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 442-472.