scholarly journals Gradience in subject–verb number agreement: Can bilinguals tune in?

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1523-1551
Author(s):  
Anna Jessen ◽  
Lara Schwarz ◽  
Claudia Felser
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Verb Number

AbstractThis study investigates native German speakers’ and bilingual Turkish/German speakers’ sensitivity to constraints on verbal agreement with pseudo-partitive subjects such as eine Packung Tabletten (“a pack of pills”). Although number agreement with the first noun phrase (headed by a container noun) is considered to be the norm, agreement with the second (containee) noun phrase is also possible. We combined scalar acceptability ratings with a stochastic constraint-based grammatical framework to model the relative strength of the constraints that determine speakers’ agreement preferences and subsequently tested whether these models could correctly predict speakers’ verb choices in a production task. For both participant groups, number match between the container noun phrase and the verb was the strongest determinant of both acceptability and production choices. The relative ranking of the constraints that we identified was the same for both groups, and the lack of age-of-acquisition effects suggests that constraints on variable subject–verb agreement, and their relative strength, are acquirable by both early and later learners of German. Group differences were seen in the absolute constraint weightings, however, with the bilinguals’ agreement preferences being more strongly influenced by number match with the containee phrase, indicating a comparatively greater reliance on surface-level cues to agreement (such as noun proximity) among the bilingual group.

scholarly journals O mecanismo da variação da concordância no Português: observações quanto a marcas nos verbos e nos nomes (The mechanism of variation in agreement in Portuguese: observations concerning agreement marking on verbs and nouns)

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Norma Da Silva Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Verbal Agreement

Este artigo discute a respeito de fenômenos distintos: a variação da concordância verbal e a de gênero e a de número no sintagma nominal do Português Brasileiro. A apresentação objetiva mostrar que há uma restrição linguística comum aos diferentes fenômenos, que atua fortemente na escolha das variantes.PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Concordância verbal. Concordância de gênero e de número. Português. Morfemas. ABSTRACTThis paper discusses three different phenomena: variation in verb agreement, and in gender and number agreement in the noun phrase, in Brazilian Portuguese. It aims to show that there is a common linguistic restriction on these different phenomena, which strongly conditions the choice of variants.KEYWORDS: Verbal Agreement. Gender and numbe agrément. Portuguese. Morphemes.

scholarly journals Conceptual effects on agreement: A corpus study of mismatch in English copular constructions

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Cecily Jill Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Conceptual Relationship

Research on the production of subject-verb agreement has focused on the features of the subject rather than the larger construction in which subject-verb agreement is produced or how the conceptual relationship between subjects and predicates may interact in affecting subject-verb agreement patterns. This corpus study describes subject-verb number agreement mismatch in English copular constructions which take the frame of (SEMANTICALLY LIGHT) N + [REL] + COP + (SPECIFIC) PRED NOM, where the copula reflects the grammatical number of the predicate. Results suggest that speakers make use of conceptual information from the entire construction, and not just the subject, when formulating agreement morphology.

scholarly journals Subject–Verb Number Agreement in Bilingual Processing: (Lack of) Age of Acquisition and Proficiency Effects

Languages ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Nuria Sagarra ◽  
Nicole Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Critical Period ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Tracking Data ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Perceptual Salience ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Bilingual Processing ◽  
Verb Number

Children acquire language more easily than adults, though it is controversial whether this faculty declines as a result of a critical period or something else. To address this question, we investigate the role of age of acquisition and proficiency on morphosyntactic processing in adult monolinguals and bilinguals. Spanish monolinguals and intermediate and advanced early and late bilinguals of Spanish read sentences with adjacent subject–verb number agreements and violations and chose one of four pictures. Eye-tracking data revealed that all groups were sensitive to the violations and attended more to more salient plural and preterit verbs than less obvious singular and present verbs, regardless of AoA and proficiency level. We conclude that the processing of adjacent SV agreement depends on perceptual salience and language use, rather than AoA or proficiency. These findings support usage-based theories of language acquisition.

scholarly journals Straight from the horse's mouth: agreement attraction effects with Turkish possessors

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Martina Gračanin-Yuksek ◽  
Duygu Fatma Şafak ◽  
Orhan Demir ◽  
Bilal Kırkıcı ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Retrieval Mechanism ◽  
Attraction Effects ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Attraction Errors ◽  
Turkish German

We investigated the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Turkish-German bilinguals using two tasks. The first task elicited speeded judgments to verb number violations in sentences that contained plural genitive modifiers. We addressed whether these modifiers elicited attraction errors, which have supported the use of a memory retrieval mechanism in monolingual comprehension studies. The second task examined the comprehension of a language-specific constraint of Turkish against plural-marked verbs with overt plural subjects. Bilinguals showed a reduced application of this constraint, as compared to Turkish monolinguals. Critically, both groups showed similar rates of attraction, but the bilingual group accepted ungrammatical sentences more often. We propose that the similarity in attraction rates supports the use of the same retrieval mechanism, but that bilinguals have more problems than monolinguals in the mapping of morphological to abstract agreement features during speeded comprehension, which results in increased acceptability of ungrammatical sentences.

scholarly journals Straight from the horse’s mouth

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 398-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Lago ◽  
Martina Gračanin-Yuksek ◽  
Duygu Fatma Şafak ◽  
Orhan Demir ◽  
Bilal Kırkıcı ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Memory Retrieval ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
Retrieval Mechanism ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
Plural Subjects ◽  
Attraction Errors ◽  
Turkish German

Abstract We investigated the comprehension of subject-verb agreement in Turkish-German bilinguals using two tasks. The first task elicited speeded judgments to verb number violations in sentences that contained plural genitive modifiers. We addressed whether these modifiers elicited attraction errors, which have supported the use of a memory retrieval mechanism in monolingual comprehension studies. The second task examined the comprehension of a language-specific constraint of Turkish against plural-marked verbs with overt plural subjects. Bilinguals showed a reduced application of this constraint, as compared to Turkish monolinguals. Critically, both groups showed similar rates of attraction, but the bilingual group accepted ungrammatical sentences more often. We propose that the similarity in attraction rates supports the use of the same retrieval mechanism, but that bilinguals have more problems than monolinguals in the mapping of morphological to abstract agreement features during speeded comprehension, which results in increased acceptability of ungrammatical sentences.

Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA FOOTE
Keyword(s):  
Language Production ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Number Agreement ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Grammatical Number ◽  
Verb Number

Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bock's (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.

The nature of variable sensitivity to agreement violations in L2 English

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 115-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masanori Bannai
Keyword(s):  
Number Agreement ◽  
Reading Task ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
Intermediate Learners ◽  
Variable Sensitivity ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Verb Number

This study focuses on the nature of variable sensitivity to violations of subject-verb number agreement in L2 English by examining Japanese-speaking learners’ performance in a self-paced reading task. The results of the experiment indicated that the learners were insensitive to agreement violations deriving from omission of 3rd person singular (3sg)-s, but were highly sensitive to violations deriving from overuse of 3sg-s. Their sensitivity to this type of violation, however, turned out to be non-categorical in that it was adversely affected by an adverb intervening between the subject and the verb. These results are interpreted to indicate that intermediate learners’ implementation of subject-verb agreement is not based on Agree operations, but on the Vocabulary entry for /s/ which is sensitive to the condition of the string of co-occurring terminal nodes as proposed by Hawkins and Casillas (2008).

Phonological awareness in young second language learners

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Bruck ◽  
Fred Genesee
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Phoneme Awareness ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Bilingual Group ◽  
English Speaking

ABSTRACTEnglish-speaking children (N = 91) who were attending French schools (bilingual group) were given a battery of phonological awareness tests in kindergarten and in grade 1. At the time of kindergarten testing the mean age of the children was 5:9. Their performance was compared to age-matched English-speaking children (N = 72) attending English schools (monolingual group). The bilingual children showed heightened levels of phonological awareness skills in kindergarten in the area of onset-rime awareness. By grade 1, the pattern of group differences was more complex. The monolingual and bilingual children performed similarly on onset-rime segmentation tasks. The monolingual children had higher phoneme awareness scores than their French-schooled peers; this result is interpreted to reflect the role of literacy instruction on phoneme awareness development. In comparison, the bilingual children had higher syllable segmentation scores than their monolingual peers. This result is interpreted to reflect the role of second language input on phonological awareness.

scholarly journals THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT AMONG SWEDISH AND CHINESE SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 907-921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie N. Jackson ◽  
Elizabeth Mormer ◽  
Laurel Brehm
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Completion ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
L2 Proficiency ◽  
Chinese Speakers ◽  
Verb Agreement ◽  
Second Language Speakers ◽  
L2 Production ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Verb Number ◽  
L1 English

AbstractThis study uses a sentence completion task with Swedish and Chinese L2 English speakers to investigate how L1 morphosyntax and L2 proficiency influence L2 English subject-verb agreement production. Chinese has limited nominal and verbal number morphology, while Swedish has robust noun phrase (NP) morphology but does not number-mark verbs. Results showed that like L1 English speakers, both L2 groups used grammatical and conceptual number to produce subject-verb agreement. However, only L1 Chinese speakers—and less-proficient speakers in both L2 groups—were similarly influenced by grammatical and conceptual number when producing the subject NP. These findings demonstrate how L2 proficiency, perhaps combined with cross-linguistic differences, influence L2 production and underscore that encoding of noun and verb number are not independent.

Un análisis cognitivo-funcional de la concordancia verbal con construcciones (pseudo)partitivas del tipo [N1 + de + N2]

Revue Romane ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrien Verveckken ◽  
Bert Cornillie
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Indefinite Article ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Linguistic Account

In this paper we present a corpus-based, cognitive-linguistic account of the singular/plural agreement alternation with binominal constructions belonging to the [N1singular + de + N2plural]-type. From a syntagmatic point of view, plural agreement reflects a shift from N1 as the head of the Noun Phrase towards N1 being a quantifier to N2. This view is in line with grammaticalization theory and holds for many examples, yet there are important counterexamples where we find a singular verb despite N1 being used as a quantifier. The Hispanic linguistic literature mentions several factors that would favor plural agreement with N2 such as an indefinite article, the distance between the verb and the subject, the position of the subject and pseudopartitive rather than partitive use. The corpus analysis will show that these factors are not conclusive. Our alternative account has recourse to the concept of lexical persistence and shows to what extent the quantifier use of N1 retains semantic features associated with the head use of N1. We argue that verbal agreement phenomena can be motivated by the interaction between lexical persistence and the morpho-syntactic and semantic criteria listed in literature. Lexical persistence is thus not a side effect of the grammaticalization process, but a crucial dimension of binominal constructions in that it allows us to explain quantifier uses of N1 with a singular verb.

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