Correlative Coordination and Variable Subject–Verb Agreement in German

Coordinated subjects often show variable number agreement with the finite verb, but linguistic approaches to this phenomenon have rarely been informed by systematically collected data. We report the results from three experiments investigating German speakers’ agreement preferences with complex subjects joined by the correlative conjunctions sowohl…als auch (‘both…and’), weder…noch (‘neither…nor’) or entweder…oder (‘either…or’). We examine to what extent conjunction type and a conjunct’s relative proximity to the verb affect the acceptability and processibility of singular vs. plural agreement. Experiment 1 was an untimed acceptability rating task, Experiment 2 a timed sentence completion task, and Experiment 3 was a self-paced reading task. Taken together, our results show that number agreement with correlative coordination in German is primarily determined by a default constraint triggering plural agreement, which interacts with linear order and semantic factors. Semantic differences between conjunctions only affected speakers’ agreement preferences in the absence of processing pressure but not their initial agreement computation. The combined results from our offline and online experimental measures of German speakers’ agreement preferences suggest that the constraints under investigation do not only differ in their relative weighting but also in their relative timing during agreement computation.

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Characteristics of Case Marking on a Sentence Completion Task in Japanese Children with Specific Language Impairment

The Japan Journal of Logopedics and Phoniatrics ◽

10.5112/jjlp.62.39 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 62 (1) ◽

pp. 39-45

Author(s):

Aimi Murao ◽

Tomohiko Ito

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Specific Language Impairment ◽

Sentence Completion ◽

Japanese Children ◽

Specific Language ◽

Case Marking ◽

Completion Task

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Qualitatively Different Effects of Undetected and Unidentified Auditory Primes

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A ◽

10.1080/02724988843000140 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 40 (2) ◽

pp. 323-339 ◽

Cited By ~ 51

Author(s):

J. A. Groeger

Keyword(s):

Semantic Priming ◽

Forced Choice ◽

Sentence Completion ◽

Semantic Activation ◽

Unconscious Processing ◽

Priming Stimulus ◽

Completion Task ◽

Threshold Measurement

The suggestion that semantic activation can occur without conscious identification of the priming stimulus is still controversial. Many studies supporting such a contention, especially those where primes were auditorially presented, suffer from methodological shortcomings, frequently with regard to threshold measurement. In the study reported here 24 subjects underwent a considerably more rigorous thresholding procedure than has been usual, prior to engaging in a forced-choice sentence completion task. The results show that semantic priming operates when subjects were unable to detect the presence of primes and that phonological (but not semantic) priming operates when the primes were invariably detected but never correctly identified. The relevance of these qualitatively different effects of primes, as a function of the level at which they are presented, in discussed in the light of recent accounts of unconscious processing.

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

LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts ◽

10.3765/exabs.v0i0.575 ◽

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.

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Psycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructions

Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics ◽

10.1075/arcl.7.07gri ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 7 ◽

pp. 163-186 ◽

Cited By ~ 36

Author(s):

Stefan Th. Gries ◽

Stefanie Wulff

Keyword(s):

Foreign Language ◽

Language Learners ◽

Short Distance ◽

Priming Effect ◽

Sentence Completion ◽

Priming Effects ◽

Corpus Linguistic ◽

Foreign Language Learners ◽

Linguistic Evidence ◽

Acceptability Rating

In Construction Grammar, highly frequent syntactic configurations are assumed to be stored as symbolic units in the mental lexicon alongside words. Considering the example of gerund and infinitival complement constructions in English (She tried rocking the baby vs. She tried to rock the baby), this study combines corpus-linguistic and experimental evidence to investigate the question whether these patterns are also stored as constructions by German foreign language learners of English. In a corpus analysis based on 3,343 instances of the two constructions from the British component of the International Corpus of English, a distinctive collexeme analysis was computed to identify the verbs that distinguish best between the two constructions; these verbs were used as experimental stimuli in a sentence completion experiment and a sentence acceptability rating experiment. Two kinds of short-distance priming effects were investigated in the completion data: we checked how often subjects produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction after having rated an ing- or to-construction (rating-to-production priming), and how often they produced an ing-/to-/’other’-construction when they had produced and ing- or to-construction in the directly preceding completion (production-to-production priming). Furthermore, we considered the proportion of to-completions before a completion in the questionnaire as a measure of a within-subject accumulative priming effect. We found no rating-to-production priming effects in the expected direction, but a weak effect in the opposite direction; short-distance production-to-production priming effects from ing to ing and from ‘other’ and to to to, and, on the whole at least, a suggestive accumulative production-to-production priming effect for both constructions. In the rating task, we found that subjects rate sentences better when the sentential structure is compatible with the main verb’s collexemic distinctiveness.

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

Studies in Second Language Acquisition ◽

10.1017/s0272263118000025 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 40 (4) ◽

pp. 907-921 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

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.

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Alcohol-Related Sentence-Completion Task

PsycTESTS Dataset ◽

10.1037/t36934-000 ◽

2010 ◽

Author(s):

A. K. Rose ◽

M. Mason-Li ◽

D. Nicholas ◽

M. Hobbs

Keyword(s):

Sentence Completion ◽

Completion Task

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Hayling Sentence Completion Task

Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology ◽

10.1007/978-0-387-79948-3_5369 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 1211-1211

Keyword(s):

Sentence Completion ◽

Completion Task

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Children's understanding of pronouns that differ in scope of reference

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000919000254 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 46 (05) ◽

pp. 1012-1024

Author(s):

Hakima MEGHERBI ◽

Alix SEIGNEURIC ◽

Jane OAKHILL ◽

Steve BUENO

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Noun Phrase ◽

Cognitive Effort ◽

Comprehension Task ◽

Completion Task ◽

Preceding Context ◽

Linguistic Approaches

AbstractSome pronouns can refer to entities that vary widely in scope. In some cases, the referent might be a noun phrase, and in other cases it might be a whole proposition. In the cases of pronouns with a noun phrase antecedent, an already existing referent is reactivated from the preceding context. In the case of pronouns with a propositional antecedent, the referent must be reformulated. The interpretation and use of such pronouns was investigated in 150 eight-year-old children in a reading comprehension task. Experiment 1 used a referent specification task and Experiment 2 used a completion task. It was more difficult for children to process a pronoun when its antecedent was a proposition compared to a noun phrase. These results are in line with the linguistic approaches (e.g., Gundel et al., 2005) according to which processing of pronouns with a propositional antecedent is more complex and requires greater cognitive effort.

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