Abstract
An important question within psycholinguistic research is whether grammatical features, such as number values on nouns, are probabilistic or discrete. Similarly, researchers have debated whether grammatical specifications are only set for individual lexical items, or whether certain types of noun phrases (NPs) also obtain number valuations at the phrasal level. Through a corpus analysis and an oral production task, we show that conjoined NPs can take both singular and plural verb agreement and that notional number (i.e., the numerosity of the referent of the subject noun phrase) plays an important role in agreement with conjoined NPs. In two written production tasks, we show that participants who are exposed to plural (versus singular or unmarked) agreement with conjoined NPs in a biasing story are more likely to produce plural agreement with conjoined NPs on a subsequent production task. This suggests that, in addition to their sensitivity to notional information, conjoined NPs have probabilistic grammatical specifications that reflect their distributional properties in language. These results provide important evidence that grammatical number reflects language experience, and that this language experience impacts agreement at the phrasal level, and not just the lexical level.
Highlights
An important question in language research concerns the nature of grammatical representations
In the remaining two experiments, which involved written production tasks with a learning component based on Haskell et al (2010), we evaluated whether probabilistic grammatical representations play a role in agreement with conjoined noun phrases (NPs)
Effect of Noun Number In order to determine the role of constituent grammatical number on agreement with conjoined NPs, we investigated whether the presence of plural markings on one or both of the individual nouns changed the rate of plural agreement using all 736 conjoined NPs from the corpus that had a number-marked verb
Summary
An important question in language research concerns the nature of grammatical representations. Traditional linguistic analysis of subject–verb number agreement treats grammatical number specifications as discrete, an assumption explicitly adopted in some prominent models of lexical access (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al, 1999) and agreement production (Eberhard et al, 2005). By this view, nouns bear discrete values (e.g., singular, plural, and dual), which speakers use to form grammatical agreement with the verb. In probabilistic models of language production, such as the Constraint Satisfaction model (Haskell and MacDonald, 2003), instead of bearing discrete number representations, nouns accumulate evidence for singular or plural verb agreement.
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