Subject-verb Agreement Violations Research Articles

Why non-native speakers sometimes outperform native speakers in agreement processing

AbstractIt is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals’ susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals’ judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures.

Perceptual salience and the processing of subject-verb agreement in 9–11-year-old English-speaking children: Evidence from ERPs

ABSTRACTRecent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants’ sensitivity to grammatical violations (Sundara, Demuth & Kuhl 2011). This raises the possibility that similar effects may manifest in school-aged children. To investigate this possibility, we recorded ERPs while 9–11-year-old English-speaking children (n = 24) listened to sentences with grammatical versus ungrammatical subject-verb agreement (i.e., third-person singular). Ungrammatical verbs differed in their relative perceptual salience due to the overtness of the error—errors of commission (i.e., superfluous -s) versus errors of omission (i.e., absent -s), and the position of the violation—utterance-medial versus utterance-final. Overall, the violations elicited an N400 effect, indicating that children were sensitive to the grammaticality differences. However, this effect was only significant for errors of commission, and utterance-position did not play a role. These results differ from those of adults, where both errors of omission and commission elicited a P600 effect, which was larger in utterance final position. These findings suggest that the relative perceptual salience of the grammatical violation influences the processing of S-V agreement in both children and adults, but the processing strategies differ, with children relying more on local, shallow processing rather than global, deep processing.

Does better explicit knowledge of a morphosyntactic structure guarantee more native-like electrophysiological processing? An ERP study with French learners of English

The possible transformation of the explicit knowledge developed during classroom learning of a second language into implicit knowledge of that language remains an open issue. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the explicit and implicit processing of morphosyntactic violations of English as an L2. ERP responses were obtained from 24 French learners (12 Intermediate and 12 Advanced) and 12 Native controls (NS) while participants evaluated the grammaticality of orally presented sentences containing subject-verb agreement violations. Results show that NS and Advanced speakers outperformed the Intermediate ones on the behavioural task. A P600 effect was obtained for all groups. Additionally, NS and Advanced learners exhibited an early negativity after violations while there was no significant effect in Intermediate speakers. The presence and amplitude of this early negativity was correlated with the structure-specific proficiency of Intermediate speakers and with the time of instruction of all learners. Results suggest that the superior native-likeness of the early responses obtained in Advanced learners is due more to their better proficiency and superior degree of explicit instruction than to the direct opportunity for implicit knowledge that their stay abroad represented.

Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension.

We investigated the relative independence of two key processes in language comprehension, as reflected in the P600 ERP component. Numerous studies have linked the P600 to sentence- or message-level reanalysis; however, much research has shown that skilled, cue-based memory retrieval operations are also important to successful language processing. Our goal was to identify whether these cue-based retrieval operations are part of the reanalysis processes indexed by the P600. To this end, participants read sentences that were either grammatical or ungrammatical via subject-verb agreement violations, and in which there was either no possibility for retrieval interference or there was an attractor noun interfering with the computation of subject-verb agreement (e.g., "The slogan on the political poster(s) was/were …"). A stimulus onset asynchrony manipulation (fast, medium, or slow presentation rate) was designed to modulate participants' ability to engage in reanalysis processes. Results showed a reliable attraction interference effect, indexed by reduced behavioral sensitivity to ungrammaticalities and P600 amplitudes when there was an opportunity for retrieval interference, as well as an effect of presentation rate, with reduced behavioral sensitivity and smaller P600 effects at faster presentation rates. Importantly, there was no interaction between the two, suggesting that retrieval interference and sentence-level reanalysis processes indexed by the P600 can be neurocognitively distinct processes.

Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study.

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components—LAN and P600—in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys *runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

Second language sensitivity to agreement errors: Evidence from eye movements during comprehension and translation

ABSTRACTThe present study addresses the questions of (a) whether Korean learners of English show sensitivity to subject–verb agreement violations in an eye-tracking paradigm, and (b) how reading goals (reading for comprehension vs. translation) and second language (L2) proficiency modulate depth of morphological agreement processing. Thirty-six Korean speakers of L2 English and 32 native English speakers read 40 stimulus sentences, half of which contained subject–verb agreement violations in English. The factors were whether a head and a local intervening noun matched in number and whether a sentence was grammatical or not. In linear mixed models analyses, both agreement violations and noun phrase match/mismatch were found to be disruptive in processing for native speakers at the critical regions (verb and following word), and locally distracting number-marked nouns yielded an asymmetric pattern depending on grammaticality. When L2 speakers were asked to produce offline oral translations of the English sentences into Korean, they became more sensitive to agreement violations. In addition, higher L2 proficiency predicted greater sensitivity to morphological violations. The results indicate that L2 speakers are not necessarily insensitive to morphological violations and that L2 proficiency and task modulate the depth of L2 morphological processing.

Production and Processing of Subject–Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment

In this study, the authors investigated whether errors with subject-verb agreement in monolingual Dutch children with specific language impairment (SLI) are influenced by verb phonology. In addition, the productive and receptive abilities of Dutch acquiring children with SLI regarding agreement inflection were compared. An SLI group (6-8 years old), an age-matched group with typical development, and a language-matched, younger, typically developing (TD) group participated in the study. Using an elicitation task, the authors tested use of third person singular inflection after verbs that ended in obstruents (plosive, fricative) or nonobstruents (sonorant). The authors used a self-paced listening task to test sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations. Omission was more frequent after obstruents than nonobstruents; the younger TD group used inflection less often after plosives than fricatives, unlike the SLI group. The SLI group did not detect subject-verb agreement violations if the ungrammatical structure contained a frequent error (omission), but if the ungrammatical structure contained an infrequent error (substitution), subject-verb agreement violations were noticed. The use of agreement inflection by children with TD or SLI is affected by verb phonology. Differential effects in the 2 groups are consistent with a delayed development in Dutch SLI. Parallels between productive and receptive abilities point to weak lexical agreement inflection representations in Dutch SLI.

The detection of subject–verb agreement violations by German-speaking children: An eye-tracking study

This study examines the processing of sentences with and without subject–verb agreement violations in German-speaking children at three and five years of age. An eye-tracking experiment was conducted to measure whether children's looking behavior was influenced by the grammaticality of the test sentences. The older group of children turned their gaze faster towards a target picture and looked longer at it when the object noun referring to the target was presented in a grammatical sentence with subject–verb agreement compared to when the object noun was presented in a sentence in which an agreement violation occurred. The younger group of children displayed less conclusive results, with a tendency to look longer but not faster towards the target picture in the grammatical compared to the ungrammatical condition. This is the first experimental evidence that German-speaking five-year old children are sensitive to subject–verb agreement and violations thereof. Our results additionally substantiate that the eye-tracking paradigm is suitable to examine children's sensitivity to subtle grammatical violations.

Brain-based individual differences in online L2 grammatical comprehension

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the impact of a range of individual difference measures related to L2 learning on proficient L1 Spanish – L2 English bilinguals’ brain responses during L2 morphosyntactic processing. Although grand mean ERP analyses revealed a biphasic N400–P600 response to English subject–verb agreement violations, subsequent analyses showed that participants’ brain responses varied along a continuum between N400- and P600-dominance. To investigate this pattern, we introduce two novel ERP measures that independently quantify relative brain response type and overall magnitude. Multivariate analyses revealed that larger overall brain responses were associated with higher L2 proficiency, while relative brain response type (N400 or P600) was predicted by a coalition of variables, most notably learners’ motivation and age of arrival in an L2 environment. Our findings show that aspects of a learner's background can differentially impact a learner's overall sensitivity to L2 morphosyntax and qualitative use of linguistic cues during processing.

Generating predictions: Lesion evidence on the role of left inferior frontal cortex in rapid syntactic analysis

A well-documented phenomenon in event-related electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies on language processing is that syntactic violations of different types elicit negativities as early as 100 msec after the violation point. Recently, these responses have been associated with activations in or very close to sensory cortices, suggesting the involvement of basic sensory mechanisms in the detection of syntactic violations. The present study investigated whether intact auditory cortices and adjacent temporal regions are sufficient to generate early syntactic negativities in the auditory event-related potential (ERP). We tested ten clinically non-aphasic patients with left inferior frontal lesions, but intact temporal cortices in a passive auditory ERP paradigm that had reliably elicited early negativities in response to violations of subject-verb agreement and word category in the past. Subject-verb agreement violations failed to elicit early grammaticality effects in these patients, whereas a group of ten age-matched controls showed a reliable early negativity. This finding supports the idea that sensory aspects of syntactic analysis as reflected in early syntactic negativities critically depend on top-down predictions generated by the left inferior frontal cortex. In contrast, word category violations elicited a small, marginally significant early negativity both in controls and patients, suggesting an additional involvement of temporal regions in early phrase structure processing. In an additional auditory oddball experiment patients showed a regular P300, but no N2b component in response to deviant tones, indicating that their deficit in generating sensory predictions extends beyond the language domain.

Event-related brain potential evidence that local nouns affect subject–verb agreement processing

The conditions under which speakers make syntactic errors, and the manner in which listeners respond to them, provide insight into how complex computational problems related to the rules of language are solved. One of the important syntactic rules of English is that a subject and its corresponding verb must agree in number. However, the presence of a number-bearing element between the subject and verb results in frequent production errors and has also been shown to complicate comprehension. When asked to press a button in response to anomalies in several narrated short stories, participants in the current study were better able to detect subject–verb agreement violations when there were no intervening words. In a separate event-related potential (ERP) experiment in which participants listened to the same stories for comprehension, simple subject–verb agreement violations elicited the predicted anterior negativity and later posterior positivity (P600). In contrast, when a singular noun phrase appeared between a singular subject and the corresponding verb, agreement violations elicited an early negativity with a distinctly posterior distribution. When a singular subject was followed by a plural noun phrase, there were no differences evident in ERPs elicited by singular and plural verbs. These results indicate that during comprehension of natural speech, the computation of subject–verb agreement is affected by the presence of number-bearing elements other than the subject itself.

CNTNAP2 and Language Processing in Healthy Individuals as Measured with ERPs

The genetic FOXP2-CNTNAP2 pathway has been shown to be involved in the language capacity. We investigated whether a common variant of CNTNAP2 (rs7794745) is relevant for syntactic and semantic processing in the general population by using a visual sentence processing paradigm while recording ERPs in 49 healthy adults. While both AA homozygotes and T-carriers showed a standard N400 effect to semantic anomalies, the response to subject-verb agreement violations differed across genotype groups. T-carriers displayed an anterior negativity preceding the P600 effect, whereas for the AA group only a P600 effect was observed. These results provide another piece of evidence that the neuronal architecture of the human faculty of language is shaped differently by effects that are genetically determined.

Event-related potentials reveal anomalous morphosyntactic processing in developmental dyslexia

ABSTRACTIn the light of the literature describing oral language difficulties in developmental dyslexia (DD), event-related potentials were used in order to compare morphosyntactic processing in 16 adults with DD (aged 20–28 years) and unimpaired controls. Sentences including subject–verb agreement violations were presented auditorily, with grammaticality and subject number as main factors. Electrophysiological data revealed differences between groups concerning both the latency of the P600 component and the additional presence in the DD group of a negativity broadly diffused all over the scalp. Moreover, these electrophysiological anomalies increased when plural sentences were processed. On the whole, the results support the hypothesis of a linguistic deficit and of different language processing modalities in DD participants.

Left inferior frontal lesions impair syntactic predictions at the sensory level

Event Abstract Back to Event Left inferior frontal lesions impair syntactic predictions at the sensory level Anna S. Hasting1*, Maria Jakuszeit1 and Sonja A. Kotz1 1 MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany Recent event-related EEG and MEG studies have shown that the detection of syntactic errors in spoken and written language coincides with sensory processes in the 100 ms range both temporally (e.g. Hasting & Kotz, 2008) and spatially (e.g. Herrmann et al., 2009). It has further been shown that sensory cortices are indeed sensitive to certain syntactic cues (Dikker et al., 2009). The present study aims to clarify whether such early sensory syntactic processing is based on syntactic rule representations within the sensory cortices, or whether it reflects rapid mismatch responses that are enabled by top-down syntactic predictions at the sensory level. The left inferior frontal cortex has frequently been found to serve syntactic functions (e.g. Friederici & Kotz, 2003) and is therefore a prime candidate region for the generation of syntactic predictions. We tested 10 patients with left inferior frontal lesions but intact temporal cortices in a passive auditory event-related potential (ERP) paradigm that had reliably elicited early grammaticality effects in the past (Hasting & Kotz, 2008). Neither word category violations nor subject-verb agreement violations elicited early grammaticality effects in these patients, whereas a group of 10 age-matched controls showed reliable negativities in response to both violation types (150 - 250 ms and 100 - 300 ms, respectively). These results show that intact auditory cortices and surrounding temporal regions do not suffice to generate early syntax-specific ERP effects. They rather suggest that early sensory aspects of syntactic analysis critically depend on top-down predictions generated by the left-inferior frontal cortex. Keywords: EEG, Language Conference: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Sessions: Neural Bases of Language Citation: Hasting AS, Jakuszeit M and Kotz SA (2011). Left inferior frontal lesions impair syntactic predictions at the sensory level. Conference Abstract: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00510 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 22 Nov 2011; Published Online: 28 Nov 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Anna S Hasting, MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, hasting@cbs.mpg.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Anna S Hasting Maria Jakuszeit Sonja A Kotz Google Anna S Hasting Maria Jakuszeit Sonja A Kotz Google Scholar Anna S Hasting Maria Jakuszeit Sonja A Kotz PubMed Anna S Hasting Maria Jakuszeit Sonja A Kotz Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Agreement attraction in comprehension: Representations and processes

Much work has demonstrated so-called attraction errors in the production of subject–verb agreement (e.g., ‘The key to the cabinets are on the table’, [Bock, J. K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93]), in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun. Six self-paced reading experiments examined the online mechanisms underlying the analogous attraction effects that have been shown in comprehension; namely reduced disruption for subject–verb agreement violations when these ‘attractor’ nouns intervene. One class of theories suggests that these effects are rooted in faulty representation of the number of the subject, while another class of theories suggests instead that such effects arise in the process of re-accessing subject number at the verb. Two main findings provide evidence against the first class of theories. First, attraction also occurs in relative clause configurations in which the attractor noun does not intervene between subject and verb and is not in a direct structural relationship with the subject head (e.g., ‘The drivers who the runner wave to each morning’). Second, we observe a ‘grammatical asymmetry’: attraction effects are limited to ungrammatical sentences, which would be unexpected if the representation of subject number were inherently prone to error. We argue that agreement attraction in comprehension instead reflects a cue-based retrieval mechanism that is subject to retrieval errors. The grammatical asymmetry can be accounted for under one implementation that we propose, or if the mechanism is only called upon when the predicted agreement features fail to be instantiated on the verb.

Setting the Stage for Automatic Syntax Processing: The Mismatch Negativity as an Indicator of Syntactic Priming

The present study investigated the automaticity of morphosyntactic processes and processes of syntactic structure building using event-related brain potentials. Two experiments were conducted, which contrasted the impact of local subject-verb agreement violations (Experiment 1) and word category violations (Experiment 2) on the mismatch negativity, an early event-related brain potential component reflecting automatic auditory change detection. The two violation types were realized in two-word utterances comparable with regard to acoustic parameters and structural complexity. The grammaticality of the utterances modulated the mismatch negativity response in both experiments, suggesting that both types of syntactic violations were detected automatically within 200 msec after the violation point. However, the topographical distribution of the grammaticality effect varied as a function of violation type, which indicates that the brain mechanisms underlying the processing of subject-verb agreement and word category information may be functionally distinct even at this earliest stage of syntactic analysis. The findings are discussed against the background of studies investigating syntax processing beyond the level of two-word utterances.

Brain responses to subject‐verb agreement violations in spoken language in developmental dyslexia: an ERP study

This study investigates the presence and latency of the P600 component in response to subject-verb agreement violations in spoken language in people with and without developmental dyslexia. The two groups performed at-ceiling level on judging the sentences on their grammaticality, but the ERP data revealed subtle differences between them. The P600 tended to peak later in the left posterior region in the dyslexic group compared with the control group. In addition, the group of dyslexic subjects did not show a P600 in response to sentences with a plural NP subject. These results suggest that brain activation involved in syntactic repair is more affected by linguistic complexity in developmental dyslexia compared with non-dyslexic individuals.

ERP Effects of Subject—Verb Agreement Violations in Patients with Broca's Aphasia

This article presents electrophysiological data on on-line syntactic processing during auditory sentence comprehension in patients with Broca's aphasia. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the scalp while subjects listened to sentences that were either syntactically correct or contained violations of subject-verb agreement. Three groups of subjects were tested: Broca patients (n = 10), nonaphasic patients with a right-hemisphere (RH) lesion (n = 5), and healthy aged-matched controls (n = 12). The healthy, control subjects showed a P600/SPS effect as response to the agreement violations. The nonaphasic patients with an RH lesion showed essentially the same pattern. The overall group of Broca patients did not show this sensitivity. However, the sensitivity was modulated by the severity of the syntactic comprehension impairment. The largest deviation from the standard P600/SPS effect was found in the patients with the relatively more severe syntactic comprehension impairment. In addition, ERPs to tones in a classical tone oddball paradigm were also recorded. Similar to the normal control subjects and RH patients, the group of Broca patients showed a P300 effect in the tone oddball condition. This indicates that aphasia in itself does not lead to a general reduction in all cognitive ERP effects. It was concluded that deviations from the standard P600/SPS effect in the Broca patients reflected difficulties with on-line maintaining of number information across clausal boundaries for establishing subject-verb agreement.

Event-Related Brain Potentials Elicited by Failure to Agree

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 13 scalp electrodes while subjects read sentences, some of which contained violations of number or gender agreement. Subjects judged the acceptability of sentences in Experiments 1 and 2 and passively read sentences in Experiment 3. In Experiment 1, violations of subject-verb number, reflexive-antecedent number, and reflexive-antecedent gender agreement elicited a widely distributed positive-going wave (P600). Subject-verb agreement violations also elicited a left-hemisphere negativity. In Experiment 2, personal pronouns that mismatched in gender with the subject noun elicited a P600, but only when subjects judged such sentences to be unacceptable. Semantically anomalous words elicited an enhanced N400 component. In Experiment 3, subject-verb number disagreement elicited a P600 and semantic anomalies elicited an enhanced N400. ERPs to reflexive-antecedent agreement violations did not differ from those to controls. We evaluate the speculation that agreement between sentence constituents reflects syntactic constraints rather than semantic or discourse factors.

On-line Sensitivity to Subject-Verb Agreement Violations in Broca′s Aphasics: The Role of Syntactic Complexity and Time

This study examined on-line sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations in patients with Broca′s aphasia and age-matched controls using a word monitoring paradigm. The agreement violations were couched in either simple or complex syntactic frames. In a first experiment, these syntactic frames were immediately followed by the noun phrase containing the target, whereas in the second experiment a 750-msec separation was introduced. The main finding of the first experiment was that patients with Broca′s aphasia showed an agreement effect only for simple (i.e., conjoined) sentences but not for complex (i.e., embedded) ones, while controls showed the expected agreement effect for both. The results of the second experiment demonstrated further that the 750-msec delay in target presentation abolished the agreement effect in Broca′s aphasics but not in normal controls. The findings are interpreted to suggest that Broca′s suffer from a pathological limitation in parsing capacity, giving rise to a faster than normal decay of syntactic information.