The Accessibility of Conceptual Number to the Processes of Subject-Verb Agreement in English

Abstract

Four experiments investigated whether the conceptual number of a subject phrase can control verb agreement in English. Following a study by Bock and Miller (1991, Experiment 2), speakers provided sentence completions for grammatically singular subject phrases that referred to one referent (e.g., The trap for the rats) or to distributed copies of a referent (e.g., The stamp on the envelopes). The numbers of plural agreement errors produced in the completions were compared. Contrary to Bock and Miller's findings, significantly more errors were produced following the distributive-referent phrases. The results of two rating studies showed that the phrases used here were easier to imagine and therefore conceptually more accessible than the phrases used in Bock and Miller's study. Additional evidence for the role of conceptual accessibility came from a positive correlation between the phrases' imageability ratings and the number of agreement errors they elicited. The implications of these results for theoretical issues concerning the interaction between conceptual and grammatical encoding are discussed. © 1999 Academic Press.