Order, distributivity and attraction during agreement production

Authors

  • María Elina Sánchez Instituto de Lingüística, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)
  • Virginia Jaichenco UBA- Universidad de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Lingüística. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Argentina. Buenos Aires – Argentina.
  • Yamila Sevilla UBA- Universidad de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Lingüística. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Argentina. Buenos Aires – Argentina.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1590/1981-5794-1711-1

Keywords:

Psycholinguistics, Sentence production, Agreement, Linear order, Distributivity, Spanish,

Abstract

Several studies have found that factors of different nature (semantic, morphological and syntactic) affect the computation of subject-verb agreement during sentence production (Bock & Miller, 1991; Franck et al., 2002; Hartsuiker et al., 2001; Haskell & MacDonald 2003; Vigliocco et al. 1995, 1996). The aims of this paper are: a) to investigate the influence of the linear order of constituents, exploiting the relative flexibility of Spanish; b) inquire whether a semantic variable, such as distributive reading, and a morphological variable, such as manipulation of the number of local noun, are factors that affect the processing of the agreement. We designed an experiment using an image description task with preambles in which the order of the subject of the sentence (pre-verbal or post-verbal), the type of preamble (nominal phrases with distributive and non-distributive reading) and the number of the local noun (singular-plural) was manipulated. The results showed a main effect of the local noun number, the type of preamble and the linear order of the constituents: more subject-verb agreement errors occurred when the sentence presented an asymmetry in the number of nouns (N1 Singular- N2 Plural), the phrases had a distributive reading and the order was subject-verb. The results seem to indicate that syntactic, semantic and morphological factors interfere together in the agreement processing in Spanish and support the postulates of the interactive models of agreement production. In addition, they provide evidence to a general processing model in which the different factors work as keys to the retrieval of information in the agreement computation (Badecker & Kuminiak 2007).

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Author Biography

María Elina Sánchez, Instituto de Lingüística, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)

Investigadora del Instituto de Lingüística, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Docente de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Becaria del Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)

Published

19/12/2017

How to Cite

SÁNCHEZ, M. E.; JAICHENCO, V.; SEVILLA, Y. Order, distributivity and attraction during agreement production. ALFA: Revista de Linguística, São Paulo, v. 61, n. 3, 2017. DOI: 10.1590/1981-5794-1711-1. Disponível em: https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/alfa/article/view/9177. Acesso em: 22 dec. 2024.

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Section

Papers