Abstract
We explore the language production process by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors. Participants were asked to create complete sentences from sentence beginnings such as The elf's/elves' house with the tiny window/windows and The statue in the elf's/elves' gardens. These are subject noun phrases containing a head noun and controller of agreement (statue) and two nonheads, a “local noun” (window(s)/garden(s)), and a possessor noun (elf's/elves'). Past research has shown that a plural nonhead noun (an “attractor”) within a subject noun phrase triggers the production of verb agreement errors, and further, that the nearer the attractor to the head noun, the greater the interference. This effect can be interpreted in terms of relative hierarchical distance from the head noun, or via a processing window account, which claims that during production, there is a window in which the head and modifying material may be co-active, and an attractor must be active at the same time as the head to give rise to errors. Using possessors attached at different heights within the same window, we are able to empirically distinguish these accounts. Possessors also allow us to explore two additional issues. First, case marking of local nouns has been shown to reduce agreement errors in languages with “rich” inflectional systems, and we explore whether English speakers attend to case. Secondly, formal syntactic analyses differ regarding the structural position of the possessive marker, and we distinguish them empirically with the relative magnitude of errors produced by possessors and local nouns. Our results show that, across the board, plural possessors are significantly less disruptive to the agreement process than plural local nouns. Proximity to the head noun matters: a possessor directly modifying the head noun induce a significant number of errors, but a possessor within a modifying prepositional phrase did not, though the local noun did. These findings suggest that proximity to a head noun is independent of a “processing window” effect. They also support a noun phrase-internal, case-like analysis of the structural position of the possessive ending and show that even speakers of inflectionally impoverished languages like English are sensitive to morphophonological case-like marking.
Highlights
When speakers produce language, they need to map the elements of a to-be-conveyed proposition onto an appropriate sentence structure, and keep track of these assignments as the utterance is produced
This cannot be reducible to a processing window effect because the local noun attractor in downstream position does produce errors, providing support for the relative proximity hypothesis. (b) Plural possessors in general induce few errors, suggesting that the cue to non-headedness provided by the possessive ending is robust in the same way overt case-marking is, and quite distinct from the cue that is specified by a preposition, lending support for the noun phrase-internal syntactic analysis of the possessive ending
We observe that the two variants of the possessive ending, ['s] and ['], differ in salience, and question whether salience plays a role in the effectiveness with which the possessor ending dampens errors
Summary
They need to map the elements of a to-be-conveyed proposition onto an appropriate sentence structure, and keep track of these assignments as the utterance is produced. Attractors in prepositional-phrase modifiers robustly elicit errors, the preposition—perhaps due to this structural separation from the noun phrase—apparently does not act as a strong cue for nonsubjecthood in the way that noun phrase-internal case marking does in the studies discussed in the previous section showing a dampening effect of case marking This pair of contrasting syntactic analyses of the possessor ending leads to differing predictions about the effect that ending will have on agreement errors. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine whether a plural possessor phrase modifying the head noun (type 9a) causes interference in the agreement process For this first experiment, auditory presentation of preambles was chosen, in line with the majority of experiments using the usual paradigm of providing subjects with preambles to turn into complete sentences
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