Agreeing on agreement: Comparing determiner selection and subject-verb agreement processes F.-Xavier Alario

Agreement is a pervasive phenomenon in many languages of the world. It can be defined as the dependency of the form of certain lexical items on other items' linguistic properties (e.g., number: singular vs. plural; grammatical gender: masculine vs. feminine) in a given utterance. Investigating this phenomenon has provided important insights on the mechanisms that underlie the syntactic and morpho-phonological encoding of words during sentence production. The studies that have looked at the issue of how agreement is computed can be broadly divided in two classes.

Studies investigating subject-verb (or noun-adjective or noun-pronoun) agreement have made use of completion paradigms where speakers are given a sentence fragment which they are asked to complete. Participant's completions are constrained so as to involve items on which an agreement computation is required. Different linguistic properties of the fragments are manipulated that induce responses with agreement errors. These studies have lead to theoretical proposals which highlight the mechanisms by which the features that will be considered for computing agreement are collected prior to be passed on to the target item (i.e., the item whose form depends on agreement).

A slightly different approach has been taken to investigate determiner selection in determiner-noun agreement contexts. These studies have mostly relied on variants of the picture naming paradigm. Participants are asked to name pictures with determiner + noun noun phrases while the information that contributes to determiner selection is manipulated. These studies have lead to theoretical proposals which highlight the mechanism by which different target items (i.e., different determiners) compete for selection.

Although the paradigms and the theoretical proposals in these two lines of research are different, they are basically addressing the same issue. That is: how is the computation of form-dependency between items achieved in a spoken utterance. In this talk, I will selectively review the empirical data and the theoretical proposals that have been proposed to account for these different types of agreement. I will discuss the similarities and differences of the conclusions reached in the two approaches, and try to weight them against one another.