| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the mental representation of subject-verb agreement, and the
factors that can affect the determination of agreement in language production. It
reports nine experiments that used a task in which participants produced sentence
completions for visually presented complex subjects such as “The greyhound
which two lively rabbits were tempting”. Such completions typically
agree with the head noun (greyhound) as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were
tempting is jumping” but sometimes agree with the local noun (rabbits)
as in “A greyhound which two lively rabbits were tempting are jumping”.
The first experiments examined the value of the concept of markedness in subject verb
number agreement to see whether it has explanatory power for languages
like Slovene with more than two number values. Results from two experiments
employing complex sentence preambles including a head noun post modified by
a prepositional phrase or a relative clause (e.g., “The nudist(s) near the sand
dune(s)”) show that Slovene number agreement differs from number agreement
in languages with no dual, but that it is not possible to simply state that the singular
is the least marked and the dual the most. I argue that using languages
with more complex number systems allows greater insight into the processes of
correct and erroneous subject-verb agreement, and shows that it is necessary to
dissociate susceptibility to agreement from error-causing status. To conclude, the
concept of markedness seems unable to explain my results.
Semantic effects in agreement are then examined using two comparison experiments
in English. Experiment 3 shows that although English has only a two value
system, speakers are sensitive to semantic differences in number. Experiment
4 explores the possible influence of speakers’ native language three-value
number system on their two-value second language system. It shows that native speakers of English are more sensitive to semantic number differences in English
than Slovene speakers of English.
Experiment 5 explores gender agreement in Slovene (which has three genders)
and shows that there is a complex pattern of agreement. As with number, there
is not just one number value which is problematic: neuter and masculine are
most confusable, but masculine errors are also common when feminine agreement
would be expected, thus suggesting that speakers revert to two different
defaults, masculine and neuter.
Finally, the results of four experiments examining number and gender agreement
in coordinated phrases are presented. Agreement in such phrases may be
resolved (i.e. the verb agrees with the whole subject) but may instead agree with
one conjunct. Agreement with one conjunct is affected byword order (agreement
with the nearest conjunct is most common), coordinator (e.g., single-conjunct
agreement is more common after “or” than “and”) and the gender or number of
the conjuncts (e.g., dual number is associated with single-conjunct agreement.
Taken together, my results suggest that agreement is affected by a complex interplay
of semantic and syntactic factors, and that the effects of a three-valued
system are quite distinct from those of a two-valued system. | en |
