Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-vdhp9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-15T22:56:58.335Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT AMONG SWEDISH AND CHINESE SECOND LANGUAGE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

Carrie N. Jackson ,
Elizabeth Mormer  and
Laurel Brehm
Carrie N. Jackson*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Elizabeth Mormer
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
Laurel Brehm
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carrie N. Jackson, 442 Burrowes Building, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: cnj1@psu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study uses a sentence completion task with Swedish and Chinese L2 English speakers to investigate how L1 morphosyntax and L2 proficiency influence L2 English subject-verb agreement production. Chinese has limited nominal and verbal number morphology, while Swedish has robust noun phrase (NP) morphology but does not number-mark verbs. Results showed that like L1 English speakers, both L2 groups used grammatical and conceptual number to produce subject-verb agreement. However, only L1 Chinese speakers—and less-proficient speakers in both L2 groups—were similarly influenced by grammatical and conceptual number when producing the subject NP. These findings demonstrate how L2 proficiency, perhaps combined with cross-linguistic differences, influence L2 production and underscore that encoding of noun and verb number are not independent.

Information

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 907 - 921
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

We thank Marianne Gullberg at Lunds Universitet in Sweden for help with collection of the L1 Swedish speaker data. We also thank Jack DiMidio, Marta Millar, Alexa Rossi, and Ted Smith for help with the L1 Chinese and L1 English speaker data collection and transcription, and two reviewers for their valuable comments. This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant OISE-0968369 (PI: J. F. Kroll; co-PIs: P. E. Dussias and J. G. van Hell).

References

REFERENCES

Antón-Méndez, I., & Hartsuiker, R. (2010). Morphophonological and conceptual effects on Dutch subject-verb agreement. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 728–748.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blattner, G. (2007). Processing verbal arguments in a first and second language: The role of immersion experience (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.Google Scholar
Bock, K., & Cutting, J. C. (1992). Regulating mental energy: Performance units in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 99–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bock, K., & Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brehm, L., & Goldrick, M. (2016). Competing plans explain agreement errors. Poster presentation at the international workshop on language production. San Diego, CA.Google Scholar
Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2007). ERP signatures of subject-verb agreement in L2 learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10, 161–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christianson, K. (2016). When language comprehension goes wrong for the right reasons: Good-enough, underspecified or shallow language processing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 817–828.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clahsen, H., & Felser, C. (2006). Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 3–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cumming, G. (2014). The new statistics: Why and how. Psychological Science, 25, 7–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunnings, I. (2017). Interference in native and non-native sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 712–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhard, K. M. (1999). The effect of conceptual number on the production of subject-verb agreement in English. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 560–578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., & Bock, K. (2005). Making syntax of sense: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531–559.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A. G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foote, R. (2010). Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 99–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E., Bergen, L., & Piantadosi, S. T. (2013). Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110, 8051–8056.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gillespie, M., & Pearlmutter, N. J. (2011). Hierarchy and scope of planning in subject-verb agreement production. Cognition, 118, 377–397.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartsuiker, R. J., Kolk, H. H. J., & Huinck, W. J. (1999). Agrammatic production of subject-verb agreement: The effect of conceptual number. Brain and Language, 69, 119–160.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haskell, T. R., Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (2010). Experience and grammatical agreement: Statistical learning shapes number agreement production. Cognition, 114, 151–164.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hatzidaki, A., Branigan, H. P., & Pickering, M. J. (2011). Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production. Cognitive Psychology, 62, 123–150.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoshino, N., Dussias, P. E., & Kroll, J. F. (2010). Processing subject-verb agreement in a second language depends on proficiency. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13, 87–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoshino, N., Kroll, J. F. K., & Dussias, P. E. (2012). Psycholinguistic perspectives on L2 speech production. In Sanz, M. & Igoa, I. M. (Eds.), Applying language science to language pedagogy: Contributions of linguistics and psycholinguistics to second language teaching (pp. 107–129). Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Humphreys, K. R., & Bock, J. K. (2005). Notional number agreement in English. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12, 689–695.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jiang, N. (2004). Morphological insensitivity in second language processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 25, 603–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jiang, N., Novokshanova, E., Masuda, K., & Wang, X. (2011). Morphological congruency and the acquisition of L2 morphemes. Language Learning, 61, 940–967.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirby, K. N., & Gerlanc, D. (2013). BootES: An R package for bootstrap confidence intervals on effect sizes. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 905–927.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition, 106, 1126–1177.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lorimor, H., Jackson, C. N., & Foote, R. (2015). How gender affects number: Cue-based retrieval in agreement production. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30, 947–954.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lorimor, H., Bock, K., Zalkind, E., Sheyman, A., & Beard, R. (2008). Agreement and attraction in Russian. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 769–799.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2012). The logic of the unified model. In Gass, S. & Mackey, A. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 211–227). Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
Nicol, J., & Greth, D. (2003). Production of subject-verb agreement in Spanish as a second language. Experimental Psychology, 50, 196–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patson, N. D., & Husband, E. M. (2016). Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 950–971.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
R Development Core Team. (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Schneider, W., Eschman, A., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-prime user’s guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools.Google Scholar
Slevc, L. R., & Martin, R. C. (2015). Syntactic agreement attraction reflects working memory processes. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 28, 773–790.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking.” In Gumperz, J. J. & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. E. (2003). Plausibility and grammatical agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 740–759.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vigliocco, G., & Hartsuiker, R. J. (2002). The interplay of meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 442–472.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wei, X., Chen, B., Liang, L., & Dunlap, S. (2015). Native language influence on the distributive effect in producing second language subject-verb agreement. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 2370–2383.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed