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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. 

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. 

Naming a picture is more difficult in the context of a taxonomically-related picture. Disagreement exists on whether non-taxonomic relations, e.g., associations, have similar or different effects on picture naming. Past work has reported facilitation, interference and null results but with inconsistent methodologies. We paired the same target word (e.g., cow) with unrelated (pen), taxonomically-related (bear), and associatively-related (milk) items in different blocks, as participants repeatedly named one of the two pictures in randomized order. Significant interference was uncovered for the same target item in the taxonomic vs. unrelated and associative blocks. There was no robust evidence of interference in the associative blocks. If anything, evidence suggested that associatively-related items marginally facilitated production. This finding suggests that taxonomic and associative relations have different effects on picture naming and has implications for theoretical models of lexical selection and, more generally, for the computations involved in mapping semantic features to lexical items. 

In his seminal essay, “The Modularity of Mind” Fodor (1983), presents arguments in favor of language comprehension as a special module along with other input processing systems. His view on language production is less clear. In this chapter, I first demonstrate that language production and comprehension are quite similar when evaluated in light of Fodor's criteria for modules: both meet a subset of those criteria in that their behavior resembles automatic processing; neither, however, is informationally encapsulated. This partial conformity with the criteria for specialized modules, leaves the question “How special is language production?” unanswered. I will then propose that this question can be answered by re-examining the origin of what resembles the behavior of an automatic system. I will argue that language production is, in fact, an efficiently monitored and controlled system, and that such monitoring and control mechanisms are shared between language production and other systems. These domain-general mechanisms, however, operate on domain-specific representations, creating specialized monitoring-control loops that can be selectively trained and selectively damaged. 

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. 

Language research has provided insight into how speakers translate a thought into a sequence of sounds that ultimately becomes words, phrases, and sentences. Despite the complex stages involved in this process, relatively little is known about how we avoid and handle production and comprehension errors that would otherwise impede communication. We review current research on the mechanisms underlying monitoring and control of the language system, especially production, with particular emphasis on whether such monitoring is issued by domain-general or domain-specific procedures.