Marking errors in language production and comprehension
The 'Verb agreement encoding during language production and comprehension' (VERBAGRENCODING) project grounded its work in the agreement attraction phenomenon. This has been used to investigate how agreement is computed during language production and language comprehension. The term refers to errors that arise when more than one noun exists in a sentence and the verb used can agree with either one or the other in number. An example would be 'The key to the cabinets is/are …'. Project researchers focused on the encoding of object–verb agreement relations in Basque and the encoding of object–clitic agreement relations with their antecedents in Spanish. The aim was to determine if they are similarly affected by attraction effects, and if they are governed by the same principles as subject–verb agreement relations. Data gathered revealed that object–verb agreement is affected by the same syntactic factors affecting the encoding of subject–verb agreement. Also, object agreement involves similar processes to those of subject agreement. Other experiments involved Spanish–Basque bilinguals. The results indicated that second language acquisition at an early age allows speakers to properly acquire agreement rules not present in their first language. With regard to number agreement encoding in Spanish, data collected indicate that agreement encoding of object–clitics involves similar processes to that of subject–verb agreement. Another series of experiments showed that, in Spanish, similar attraction effects occur in subject–verb and object–clitic agreement, both in sentence comprehension and production modalities. As such, project activities revealed that number attraction effects disrupt the production and comprehension of different types of agreement relations in similar ways in typologically different languages. VERBAGRENCODING represents the first foray into study of object–verb and object–clitic agreement relations. Project results confidently suggest that the same principles affecting subject–verb agreement relations govern the encoding of object–verb agreement relations in Basque and of object–clitic agreement relations with their antecedents in Spanish. The outcomes allow for a broader cross-linguistic characterisation of agreement encoding processes during speech production and comprehension.
Keywords
Cross-linguistic, language production, comprehension, agreement, agreement attraction, verb agreement, attraction effect
