出版社：Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto
摘要：This paper investigates the interaction between semantic and syntactic factors in the production of subject-verb agreement. Agreement errors are elicited by presenting participants with a complex subject phrase (e.g. the boy beside the trees) and asking them to complete the sentence. Conceptual manipulations of the nouns in the subject phrase have been found to affect error rates. In this study participants were given a predicate for completing their sentence. Its compatibility with the subject noun was varied and this affected error rates. The agreement mechanism thus has access to the conceptual meaning of the predicate. However, the predicate may have assigned the subject role to the incorrect NP. The second experiment examines how participants further complete sentences to see if they have incorrectly assigned the subject role, but these results were not conclusive. The results from both experiments also suggest future research into the effect of individual differences on agreement error rates.
