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

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

   Culbertson, J. (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. Representation distortion contributes to agreement attraction in comprehension

   https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2025.1708378  

   Keshev, Maayan; Cartner, Mandy; Meltzer-Asscher, Aya; Dillon, Brian (February 2026, Frontiers in Language Sciences)

   Sentence comprehension relies on encoding linguistic items in memory and accessing them subsequently to form linguistic dependencies. This makes processing susceptible to memory interference. Interference, such as the distortion of memory representations or access to irrelevant memory items, can lead to misinterpretation or grammatical errors. Over the years, research on agreement attraction has debated whether this hallmark of memory interference reflects limits of the retrieval mechanism, or inaccuracy of the encoded representations that retrieval targets. We present some evidence in favor of representational accounts of memory interference. Our findings include partial evidence for three kinds of representational effects: (a) the ungrammaticality illusion, a pattern by which attraction arises without misleading retrieval cues; (b) number errors rather than noun errors in final interpretation; and (c) mitigation of attraction when additional markers of the subject's number are available, which we label feature updating. Together, the findings seem to suggest that feature distortion in the content of memory representations contributes to attraction effects. We propose that models of memory mechanisms that mediate dependency formation should incorporate malleable representations rather than stable ones. 

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4. Understanding How Dialect Differences Shape How AAE-Speaking Children Process Sentences in Real-Time

   https://doi.org/10.1055/a-2626-3292  

   Byrd, A; Huang, YT; Edwards, J (July 2025, Seminars in Speech and Language)

   Abstract Dialect differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children comprehend sentences. However, research on real-time sentence processing has the potential to reveal the underlying causes of these differences. This study used eye tracking, which measures how children interpret linguistic features as a sentence unfolds, and examined how AAE- and MAE-speaking children processed “was” and “were,” a morphology feature produced differently in MAE and AAE. Fifty-nine participants, ages 7;8 to 11;0 years, completed standardized measures of dialect density and receptive vocabulary. In the eye tracking task, participants heard sentences in MAE with either unambiguous (e.g., “Jeremiah”) or ambiguous (e.g., “Carolyn May”), subjects and eye movements were measured to singular (image of one person) or plural referents (image of two people). After the onset of the auxiliary verb, AAE-speaking children were sensitive to “was” and “were” when processing sentences but were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use “was” as a basis for updating initial predictions of plural referents. Among African American children, dialect density was predictive of sensitivity to “was” when processing sentences. Results suggest that linguistic mismatch impacts how contrastive verb morphology is used to update initial interpretations of MAE sentences. 

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5. 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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