Subject-verb Agreement Research Articles

Agreement attraction in comprehension: do active dependencies and distractor position play a role?

ABSTRACT Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of activation, and whether such decay is affected by maintenance of features in memory.

‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters

Abstract This paper presents a case study based on the writing of James Horner, one of the many Irish emigrants who crossed the Atlantic between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Communication between Horner and his family back in Ireland was kept through personal correspondence. His letters, which contain about 14,000 words in total, are part of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR), and they provide detailed accounts of his experiences and impressions of the recently adopted country. They also show progressive standardisation, which makes them an interesting site for historical sociolinguistic analysis: shifting from vernacular Irish English towards a more standardised type of English to some degree. Our study focuses on the use of subject-verb agreement and addresses the following research questions: does geographical and social mobility condition Horner’s speech? If so, how does an individual’s social status affect language? The findings reported below show that social mobility as well as dialect contact seem to have contributed to general standardisation and the subsequent blurring of identity markers in language use. The paper, thus, offers new perspectives on the analysis of intra-speaker variation using historical data and contributes to the discussion of the need for this type of micro-analysis in the area of historical sociolinguistics.

Exploring the Transformed Landscape of Grammar Learning in Language Education: Unveiling Teaching Insights through Harnessing the Flipped Classroom Approach's Potential

The paper explores the potential of the flipped classroom model in language education, specifically for teaching grammar. The flipped model shifts traditional teaching by moving direct instruction outside class, allowing more engaging in-class activities. It also reverses teaching, putting direct instruction before class and interactive learning during class. It may stand language instructors in good stead, for it enhances engagement and comprehension. This experiment investigates its implementation, benefits, challenges, and impact on grammar learning outcomes. Notable among the challenges posed by this model, if instructors opt to avail themselves of its mechanisms, are technological barriers, including limited access to high-speed internet and a lack of compatible hardware. The study comprises an illustrative analysis that applies the model to instructing subject-verb agreement through pre-class activities, video content, quizzes, games, and essay assignments. The results palpably demonstrate an improved understanding and practical application of grammar. The flipped classroom offers transformative opportunities for language education, needing careful preparation and addressing tech challenges. It attempts to affect a qualitative leap in learning by using technology for content delivery and focusing on interactive in-class activities.

The Unexpected Lightness of the Main Verb: An Eye-Tracking Study on Relative Clauses and Trace Reactivation

A few studies on relative-clause processing report an unexpected facilitatory effect on the matrix verb that follows an Object Relative (ORC) clause (e.g. Staub, Dillon and Clifton jr. 2017). In this study we present the results of a novel eye-tracking experiment that replicated this effect on Italian. The advantage of ORCs is discussed under the hypothesis that subject-verb agreement in the matrix benefits from a general trace-reactivation mechanisms, subsumed from activation-based retrieval models (Lewis and Vasishth 2005).

Performance of Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, and DeepL Translator: Error Analysis of Translation Result

This research simulates the use of Google Translate and Microsoft Translator in translating Indonesian into English abstract and analyzes errors of translation results in the aspect of grammar and spelling using Grammarly Premium. This research is descriptive qualitative. The result analysis shows several writing issues (errors) of translation results using Microsoft Translator (MT), Google Translate (GT), and DeepL Translator (DT) in the aspect of clarity, correctness (correction), and delivery. First, there are 26 writing issues from MT including 1) 4 clarity (4 unclear sentences), 2) 21 correctness (2 comma misuse within clauses, 4 punctuation in compound/complex sentences, 5 wrong or missing prepositions, 3 incorrect verb forms, 2 determiner use, 2 conjunction use, 2 confusing words, 1 improper formatting), 3) 1 delivery (1 incomplete sentences). Second, there are 25 writing issues from GT including 1) 6 clarity (4 unclear sentences and 2 wordy sentences), 2) 17 correctness (1 misplaced word or phrase, 1 text inconsistencies, 1 comma misuse within clauses, 4 punctuation in compound/complex sentences, 3 wrong or missing prepositions, 3 incorrect verb forms, 2 conjunction use, 1 confusing word, and 1 determiner use.). 3) 2 delivery (2 incomplete sentences). Third, there are 10 writing issues from DT including 3 comma misuse within clauses, 1 incorrect noun number, 1 faulty subject-verb agreement, 1 wrong or missing preposition, 1 improper formatting, 1 misuse of modifiers, 1 conjunction use, and 1 confused word. Online translator including MT, GT, and DT may help in translating foreign language texts, but it does not always provide accurate translations. Thus, whether consciously or unconsciously, each translation machine contains its traits, whether directly or indirectly, human participation cannot be separated from machine translation technology. However, no computer translator can provide translations with the same precision as humans. It means that they are still a machine that is not able to match human capabilities equipped with feelings and thinking processes that describe them.

Cross-linguistic influence, limited input, or working-memory limitations: The morphosyntax of agreement and concord in Heritage Russian

AbstractThis study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.

Challenges for non-English speakers: inter- and intralingual factors shaping the writing of Ukrainian authors in biologial sciences

Background. Nowadays, almost all indexed journals expect submissions in English, which is a great challenge for exophonic authors. Code-switching context, where cross-language effects, especially native language interference, are well distinct, is critical for approaching the dilemma. Navigating the complicated issues of language-related challenges will be impossible without referring to three crucial levels of written production: lexical, syntactic, and textual. In our investigation, we address the nature of potential errors and their inter- and intralingual origins. In particular, we identify and interpret the deviations from Standard English in scholarly research writing of Ukrainian authors in the field of life sciences, exemplify and classify errors into categories based on the type of language misuse. Materials and Methods. Language material for the study comprised 50 manuscripts submitted by authors from Ukraine to the journal “Studia Biologica”. This research is a mixed-method study encompassing descriptive qualitative and descriptive quantitative methods. Content analysis was employed as the data gathering technique. The analysis of texts was focused on tracing deviations from consistent principles and rules of Standard English and linguistic features of English research discourse and encompassed such steps as highlighting the error, cross-checking and stating the deviation, listing and classifying the errors, and tracing a possible connection of the error to authors’ first language interference. Results. The study identified language areas where Ukrainian authors fail to effectively communicate their ideas to the global academic community. At the textual level, the problem areas encompass defective paragraph structure and excessive verbosity. At the syntactic level, the most critical deviations from the language and stylistic norm comprised misuses of word order and clauses, wordy and confusing sentences with multiple issues that hinder the readability of text. The most widespread grammatical mistakes include missing predicates, faulty subject-verb agreement, incorrect forms of the verb, and inappropriate use of articles, pronouns, demonstratives and quantifiers. At the lexical level, the prevalent errors relate to various types of loan translation, but also include improper word choices and poor vocabulary. Orthographic mistakes, though in minority, refer to the spelling of toponyms, capitalisation, switching from American to British orthographic standards and other random spelling errors. Conclusions. An insight into the nature of the analysed deviations suggests the presence of both intra- and interlingual factors that cause mistakes in papers submitted for publication in the field of life sciences. The error analysis can be beneficial in the educational process for both educators and practitioners. Proper understanding of the functional mechanism of the mistakes might increase the awareness of the potential pitfalls and consequently help avoid them. The classification of errors can be adopted in the educational process and contribute to the development of error pedagogy.

Pembelajaran Bahasa Bahasa Asing dan Tolerance of Ambiguity: Sebuah Studi Kasus dari penguasaan Grammar

Tolerance for Ambiguity (TfA) which is commonly involved in the field of Human Resources in industry has been adopted in the development of the quality of foreign language learning, especially foreign language acquisition by learners. In this study, the reference is French language which is limited by Subject Verb Agreement involving the periodic verb [+Present]. There are two research objectives, namely (1) to describe the tendency of TfA level at the beginning of the lecture and (3) to describe the students' efforts in developing TfA. The results of the study using a qualitative descriptive approach show that, first, the students have a high level of TfA although the students still make mistakes in French but the problem is not too significant because the suffixes representing the features of Tense [+Present], Person [+1P, +2P, +3P] and Number [±Plural] on verbs from the grammar area Subject Verb Agreement (SVA). Secondly, a high level of TfA is well-established by the students because they have the ability to maintain and develop the aspect of efforts to master SVA in French.

Grammatical Features in Indonesia English: A Study of Indonesian College Students

This study aims to expose detailed descriptions of the grammatical features of Indonesian English. Indonesian English refers to a newly recognised linguistic variety of English as proposed by Coleman (2017). The grammatical characteristics as the result of acquiring a new language lead to the presence of a new variety of Indonesian English. Applying descriptive qualitative research, the data were collected based on recordings of the speech of 24 college students on three different topics. Following the principle proposed by Cogo and Dewey (2012), this study reveals twelve grammatical features as the characteristics of Indonesian English. They are namely the over-generalisation and omission of the copula BE (i.e am, is, are), the use of Indonesian collocation and literal translation, subject–verb agreement, the omission of the plural marker 's', assigning different lexical meanings, inappropriate prepositions, the omission of possessive markers, the omission and addition of articles, the application of verb tenses, the use of Indonesian acronyms and abbreviations, the incorrect construction of passive forms, and the use of Indonesian lexical items. It is shown that one of the main factors in the emergence of this new English variant is the contact of the multiple languages used by the speakers.

Kajian Terhadap Common Errors dalam Penerapan Aturan Subject-Verb Agreement Bahasa Inggris

English as a foreign language that is widely used in the world provides a challenge to every learner. Grammar rules in English are one of the challenges faced by learners, especially in Subject-verb Agreement rules. This article aims to analyze the types of common errors made by students and determine the types of common errors with the highest percentage of common errors found. With a qualitative and quantitative descriptive design, this study chose students in the English Education Study Program, FKIP UMSU as the research sample. Based on the results of the analysis, it was found that there were three types of common errors found in the use of subject-verb agreement rules in English by students at the English Education Study Program, errors between singular/plural subjects, errors in tense selection, and types of errors in the form 'to' form of verb/split of verb. Furthermore, it can be obtained that the highest percentage of errors obtained is in the type of 'to' form of verb/split of verb in question no. 20 where there were 82 students who answered incorrectly with a percentage of 66.12%.

AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE READING ENHANCEMENT PROGRAM AND LITERARY COMPETENCE OF THE GRADE 7 STUDENTS

This Experimental research study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the reading enhancement program to the Literary Competence of Grade 7 students. It used quantitative methodology in the gathering of data through the pretest and posttest conducted in both experimental and control groups. The subjects of the study were the Grade 7 students of Camanlangan National High School. They were composed of two heterogeneous sections with 40 students per group. The experimental group was exposed to the Different Learning Approaches using the Differentiated Instruction (DI) while the control group used the traditional method of instruction. It was found out that there was a significant gain in the literary competence in the areas of Contextual Knowledge, Knowledge about Reading, Literary Reading Skills, and Textual Knowledge, of the students after the intervention. Furthermore, the students eagerly responded to the application of different teaching strategies as well as the use of Differentiated Instructions. It was therefore concluded that this enhancement program is an effective method of enhancing the Literary Competence and is recommended that the school administration must encourage and support the use of this approach by exposing teachers to different fora and symposia/seminars and workshops to improve their instructional competence in reading delivery so as to provide updated techniques in improving reading skills of the students. They are encouraged to give ample time to discuss the basics of grammar, especially in the rules of subject-verb agreement, the basic sentence patterns, and the different tenses of the verb, which are crucial to developing literary competence in students. KEYWORDS: Literary Competence, Contextual Knowledge, Knowledge about Reading, Literary Reading Skills, Textual Knowledge, Differentiated Instruction, Experimental research,

Effects of Explicit Written Corrective Feedback on Subject-Verb Agreement among Kurdish EFL Students

Effects of Explicit Written Corrective Feedback on Subject-Verb Agreement among Kurdish EFL Students

Assessing knowledge of English verb placement and subject-verb agreement among multilingual students in grades 5–7 in Norway

Abstract This study investigates knowledge of English verbal morphosyntax among multilingual students and their L1 Norwegian peers in grades 5–7 in Norway. L1 Norwegian speakers have previously shown transfer from Norwegian to verb placement or subject-verb agreement in L2 English, but their multilingual peers may have an advantage in acquiring these properties in L3 English due to their knowledge of other languages. A written test examining verb placement in verb-second (V2) contexts and subject-verb agreement was used to compare L1 Norwegian students with their multilingual peers, who spoke a variety of different L1s in the home. The results showed that the difference in mean scores alone was not significant between the L1 Norwegian group and the multilingual group, but when grade level and academic achievement were controlled for, linguistic group membership did significantly predict better performance by the multilingual group for some, but not all, grammatical conditions examined.

Grammatical Problems in the Discussion Section of Master Theses

The discussion section is one part of the thesis that describes the findings of research by demonstrating deep knowledge of the findings, interpreting the findings, and emphasizing the contribution to the current knowledge. Additionally, discussion section is also the most challenging part of the thesis. This study aimed to find out the most grammatical problems and the causes of grammatical problems in discussion section of thesis written by English Education postgraduate Program students at University of Bengkulu. This study used a mixed method in analyzing the data. Most of the grammatical problems were investigated quantitatively, while the causes of grammatical problems were studied qualitatively. The corpuses of this study were 30 master theses written by postgraduate English students who have graduated in 2021. The findings showed that the most frequent grammatical problems found in the discussion section of the thesis were incorrect verbs with 65,4% or 121 times of errors, which were dominated by tense confusion and subject-verb agreement. The cause of the grammatical problems found in the discussion section of the thesis was first-language interference. The conclusion of this study provides information about the most frequent grammatical problems and possible causes in the thesis discussion section to increase the writer's awareness about the importance of grammatical writing in the discussion section.

Verb agreement production in Arabic-speaking children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT Verb morphology difficulties have been widely attested in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) who speak English and other languages. This research contributes data on a variety of Arabic, a richly inflected Semitic language. The current study examined the production of subject-verb agreement morphology in three groups of 30 monolingual Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. Ten preschoolers diagnosed with DLD (M = 4;4 years) were compared to two groups of typically developing (TD) controls —10 language-matched (TD-LA) (M = 2;7 years) and 10 chronological age-matched (TD-CA) (M = 4;5 years). To elicit target productions, an action video depicting a total of 33 randomly ordered third-person verb stimuli (12 feminine singular, 9 masculine singular, and 12 plurals) was presented. The results confirmed significant differences in the correct use of third-person verb (gender and number) agreement between the children with DLD and the two comparison groups. The DLD group was more proficient with masculine forms than with feminine or plural markings. Qualitative error analyses revealed that this group had a proclivity to overgeneralize the masculine for other agreement markings. The findings are discussed in relation to relevant theories of typical and impaired language acquisition. The implications for assessing and treating verb morphological deficits are highlighted.

The Grammatical Interference of Indonesian Students in Learning English

Interference is one of many factors that can damage a language system. It frequently happens in langauge learning process. The interference happened due to the tendency to adapt the feature of one language to another without considering the similarities and differences between the languages. Language interference can take part either in phonological, lexical, or grammatical aspects. The current paper aims to reveal the most frequent grammatical interference made by the students in learning English. To get broader insight, the library research is carried out. It relies on other articles under the same concers of students’ grammatical interference in learning English as the main objective. Six researches were taken to be referred as the primary sources which were published within the last 5 years. The results of each study were explored to get more comprehension for the inquiries of this paper. Based on the analysis, the results showed that the students’ grammatical interference in learning English were made in the form of morphological and syntactical structure. The most frequent syntactical interference deals with word order. While the morphological interference was dominated by the use of tense, be form, subject-verb agreement, singular and plural form. Keywords : Grammatical Interference, Indonesian, English Learning

Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey of the State of the Art

Abstract Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting errors in text. The task not only includes the correction of grammatical errors, such as missing prepositions and mismatched subject–verb agreement, but also orthographic and semantic errors, such as misspellings and word choice errors, respectively. The field has seen significant progress in the last decade, motivated in part by a series of five shared tasks, which drove the development of rule-based methods, statistical classifiers, statistical machine translation, and finally neural machine translation systems, which represent the current dominant state of the art. In this survey paper, we condense the field into a single article and first outline some of the linguistic challenges of the task, introduce the most popular datasets that are available to researchers (for both English and other languages), and summarize the various methods and techniques that have been developed with a particular focus on artificial error generation. We next describe the many different approaches to evaluation as well as concerns surrounding metric reliability, especially in relation to subjective human judgments, before concluding with an overview of recent progress and suggestions for future work and remaining challenges.We hope that this survey will serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers who are new to the field or who want to be kept apprised of recent developments.

Investigating Errors in the Written Composition of Undergraduate ESL Learners at Aligarh Muslim University

This study investigated common English writing errors made by undergraduate ESL learners at Aligarh Muslim University whose first language is Urdu-Hindi. The study is carried out with the help of written compositions from 20 participants. The data were analyzed within a broader framework propounded by S. Pit Corder. The researcher concluded that the study's errors were in the form of spelling, copula, word choice, prepositions, verb tenses, plural formation, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, and articles. The reasons behind these errors were identified as interlingual and intralingual causes, whereas intralingual was the most significant factor, which indicates their inadequate knowledge about grammar. The findings of the study were spelling (19.35%), copula (14.51%), word choice (12.90%), prepositions (11.29%), verb tenses (9.67%), plural formation (19.13%), punctuations (8.60%), subject-verb agreement (8.06%) and articles (6.45%). So, based on above data analysis the most common type of errors was spelling that is 19.35% and the least common one was article that is 6.45%.,. The findings of the study have implications for the researchers of scientific papers, especially in the realm of English as a Second Language learning.

Grammatical Analysis of African American Vernacular English in The Eminem Show Album: A Linguistics Perspective

Albeit the research on African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as nonstandard form of English spoken by African Americans in lower socioeconomic classes has been documented by many scholars, little is known about it from the perspective of Wolfram's theory. To fill this lacuna, the present study aims to elucidate the grammatical elements of Eminem's lyrics song in the album "The Eminem Show." This single case study showcased 32 lyrics song from Eminem's album with that seven grammatical features such as copula/auxiliary absence, the invariant be, the remote been, the subject verb agreement, the negation, the question formation, and the nominals. The findings found that negation is the most common grammatical features whereas the invariant be is the least common. The findings indicated that songs serve as a platform for asserting identity and criticizing diverse social, cultural, political, and economic issues. The performers are free to improvise in accordance with the tendencies and interests of the critic. Thus, the song can serve both to identify the current social crisis and as a catalyst for the crisis itself.

ERROR ANALYSIS: INVESTIGATING THE PARAGRAPH WRITING OF ESL MALAYSIAN LEARNERS

The study investigates an impromptu writing task administered to diploma students studying in one of the technical universities on the East Coast of Malaysia. In particular, it identifies their errors in writing a one-paragraph essay, the kind of errors students made in completing the task, and the least errors students made in writing the one-paragraph. The samples were 48 students undergoing Preliminary Semester taking English as one of the subjects in the particular semester. The study found that students made errors to a certain degree in using articles, tenses, and subject-verb-agreement (SVA), to name a few in the current study. More specifically, the highest number of errors students made were in tenses, SVA, and word choices, while the least errors were in possessive and attributive structures, gerunds, and infinitives. The study implied that assigning students impromptu writing contributed to their performance errors. Despite their low vocabulary knowledge, it also made them less expressive when writing in the condition.