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1. Revisiting Agreement: Do Children and Adults Compute Subject-verb Agreement Differently?

   Nozari, N.; Omaki., A. (January 2022, Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.)

   Culbertson, J.; Perfors, A.; Rabagliati, H.; Ramenzoni, V. (Ed.)

   Adult speakers rarely produce a verb that does not agree with its subject in number, unless the sentence contains nouns with clashing pluralities. For example, a sentence such as “The key next to the cabinets…”, sometimes elicits a plural verb, and such attraction errors are more common with singular than plural heads (the attraction asymmetry). Both attraction and attraction asymmetry have been instrumental in understanding the computations underlying agreement production. Interestingly, developmental studies of agreement have often found very different patterns of agreement errors in children, leading to the conclusion of different mechanisms for agreement production in children and adults. Using a referential communication game, we demonstrate that Englishspeaking children as young as 5 years of age show robust agreement attraction. Children 6 years and older also demonstrate the attraction asymmetry. These findings support similar mechanisms underlying agreement production in children and adults. 

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2. Syntactic production is not independent of inhibitory control: Evidence from agreement attraction errors.

   Nozari, N; Omaki, A (January 2018, The Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Native adult speakers of a language can produce grammatical sentences fluently, effortlessly, and with relatively few errors. These characteristics make the highly-practiced task of speaking a viable candidate for an automatic process, i.e., one independent of cognitive control. However, recent studies have suggested that some aspects of production, such as lexical retrieval and tailoring speech to an addressee, may depend on the speaker’s inhibitory control abilities. Less clear is the dependence of syntactic operations on inhibitory control processes. Using both a direct manipulation of inhibitory control demands and an analysis of individual differences, we show that one of the most common syntactic operations, producing the correct subject-verb agreement, requires inhibitory control when a singular subject noun competes with a plural local noun as in “The snake next to the purple elephants is green.”. This finding calls for the integration of inhibitory control mechanisms into models of agreement production, and more generally into theories of syntactic production. 

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3. Exploring the abstractness of number retrieval cues in the computation of subject-verb agreement in comprehension

   Schlueter, Zoe.; Williams, Alexander; Lau, Ellen (April 2018, Journal of memory and language)

   Subject-verb agreement has provided critical insights into the cue-based memory retrieval system that supports language comprehension by showing that memory interference can cause erroneous agreement with non-subjects: ‘agreement attraction’. Here we ask how faithful retrieval cues are in relation to the grammar. We examine the impact of conjoined singular attractors (The advice from the doctor and the nurse. . .), which are syntactically plural but whose plurality is introduced by a vehicle, the conjunction ‘and’, that is not an unequivocal correlate of syntactic plurality. We find strong agreement attraction, which suggests that retrieval processes do not only target unequivocal morphological correlates of syn- tactic plurality. However, we also find some attraction with conjoined adjective attractors (The advice from the diligent and compassionate doctor. . .), which is compatible with a system in which an imperfect correlate of syntactic plurality, like the word ‘and’, can become associated with the plural retrieval cue due to frequent co-occurrence with the actual target feature. 

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4. The impact of dialect differences on spoken language comprehension

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716423000243  

   Byrd, Arynn S.; Huang, Yi Ting; Edwards, Jan (July 2023, Applied Psycholinguistics)

   Abstract Research has suggested that children who speak African American English (AAE) have difficulty using features produced in Mainstream American English (MAE) but not AAE, to comprehend sentences in MAE. However, past studies mainly examined dialect features, such as verbal -s , that are produced as final consonants with shorter durations when produced in conversation which impacts their phonetic saliency. Therefore, it is unclear if previous results are due to the phonetic saliency of the feature or how AAE speakers process MAE dialect features more generally. This study evaluated if there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used the auxiliary verbs was and were, a dialect feature with increased phonetic saliency but produced differently between the dialects, to interpret sentences in MAE. Participants aged 6, 5–10, and 0 years, who spoke MAE or AAE, completed the DELV-ST, a vocabulary measure (PVT), and a sentence comprehension task. In the sentence comprehension task, participants heard sentences in MAE that had either unambiguous or ambiguous subjects. Sentences with ambiguous subjects were used to evaluate group differences in sentence comprehension. AAE-speaking children were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use the auxiliary verbs was and were to interpret sentences in MAE. Furthermore, dialect density was predictive of Black participant’s sensitivity to the auxiliary verb. This finding is consistent with how the auxiliary verb is produced between the two dialects: was is used to mark both singular and plural subjects in AAE, while MAE uses was for singular and were for plural subjects. This study demonstrated that even when the dialect feature is more phonetically salient, differences between how verb morphology is produced in AAE and MAE impact how AAE-speaking children comprehend MAE sentences. 

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5. A multidimensional perspective on the acquisition of subject-verb dependencies by Haitian-Creole speaking children: Insights from comprehension and production

   https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.22001.bar  

   Barrière, Isabelle; Joseph, Blandine; Aharodnik, Katsiaryna; Kresh, Sarah; Fleurio, Guetjens Prince; Legendre, Géraldine; Nazzi, Thierry (August 2023, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages)

   Abstract The present multidimensional study investigates the acquisition of pronominal subject-verb dependencies in Standard Haitian Creole (HC). A corpus analysis confirms that HC subject pronouns are phonological clitics in the target grammar and that their reduction is optional and unpredictable. The comprehension and production of dependencies involving these subject pronouns in 20 preschoolers acquiring HC as their first language were investigated. While the production of third person singular and plural subject pronouns l(i) and y(o) reveals early mastery of adult constraints on their phonological reductions, the systematic assignments of l(i) to singular subjects vs. y(o) to plural subjects of the verb in the syntactic dependency emerge later, in both production and comprehension. The few syntactic contexts in which HC-learning children show evidence of comprehension involve full forms, rather than phonological reductions. Possible factors that explain these findings include the relative unpredictability of their forms and the linguistic status of HC pronouns. 

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