The impact of notional number and grammatical gender on number agreement with conjoined noun phrases

ABSTRACT

Morphophonology influences subject–verb agreement in a wide variety of languages. Dominant models of agreement production [e.g. Marking and Morphing, Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, J. K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.112.3.531 Competition models, Mirković, J., & MacDonald, M. C. (2013). When singular and plural are both grammatical: Semantic and morphophonological effects in agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 69, 277–298. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.05.001 posit explanations for morphophonological effects that depend on ambiguity. The present study uses sentence completion tasks in Dutch (Experiment 1) and German (Experiment 2) that manipulate notional number and grammatical gender with conjoined noun phrases to investigate how morphophonology affects number agreement. Results show that speakers of both languages produced more singular agreement with items construed as more notionally singular, and with items containing two nouns with the same grammatical gender, even though, prima facie, grammatical gender should be irrelevant for subject–verb number agreement in these languages. Experiment 2 showed that the grammatical gender effect was not driven by morphophonological ambiguity. These results provide novel insight into how morphophonology, via cue-based retrieval, can affect subject–verb number agreement.

KEYWORDS:

• Language production
• number agreement
• grammatical gender
• morphophonology

Acknowledgements

Portions of this work were presented at the 7th International Workshop on Language Production. We would like to thank Maartje Dona, Annika Labrenz, Anouk Raeven and Anja Riemenschneider for their assistance with stimuli preparation and data collection, and Nora Adams for helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Eberhard et al. (2005) define S(m) as the number Specification * the contrastive frequency (C_freq), which is calculated by taking the log(10) of the total frequency over the log of the plural frequency. We do not use C_freq here, because for all nouns that have a plural counterpart, their Specification is 0, thus cancelling out the C_freq term. For the other items – the invariant singulars – C_freq terms would be undefined, as the log of zero is undefined.

2. A second analysis excluding these four participants revealed the same pattern of significant effects as the results from all 30 participants.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by NSF [OISE-0968369] to Janet van Hell.