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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. 

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.