Verb Agreement Processing In French: A Study Of On-line Grammaticality Judgments

Abstract

This study investigates the implementation of the syntactic constraint of verb agreement in French sentence processing. An experimental on-line error detection paradigm is used to examine how variations in linguistic material interposed between the subject and the verb affected the detection of number-verb agreement violations. Detection times mainly vary as a function of the linguistic structure of the interposed material: detection times are clearly longer for noun complements than for relative clauses and adverbial complements. Effect of length is shown to depend marginally on the structure type. Number mismatch between local and head nouns increases detection times, which also varies as a function of the morphology of the head noun. Results are analyzed with regard to processes found in agreement-error production studies. The role of structural, morphological, and semantic information in syntactic verb agreement processing is discussed within a crosslinguistic perspective.