Jelena Mirkovic and Maryellen C. MacDonald

1
Jelena Mirkovic and Maryellen C.
MacDonald Language and Cognitive Neuroscience
Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Theories I Grammatical Features
Quantifiers in Serbian
Experiment 2
One Form Grammatical


Number Marking and Number Morphing (Bock et al.,
2001)
Quantifier Noun noun case depends on the
quantifier
Verb
feminine
masculine
Only plural form is grammatical!
konja-DUAL .GEN.SG.
In masculine nouns, the archaic dual form is
homophonous with genitive singular form. Even
though genitive form is not the agreement
controller in subject-verb agreement, it serves
that function in adjective- noun number
agreement. If case homophony and distributional
information influence agreement production then
the number of singular verb forms (agreement
errors) in masculine nouns should be higher than
in feminine nouns.
Agreement is a systematic covariation of the
properties of linguistic elements which indicates
a relationship between them. e.g. (1) The
bird-SG. sings-SG. (2) The birds-PL. sing-PL.
Hierarchical Feature Passing (Vigliocco Nicol,
1998)
Both singular and plural verbs are grammatical!
krava-GEN.PL.NOM.SG.
Theories II Agreement Production as a Constraint
Satisfaction Process
Genitive plural form of feminine nouns is
homophonous with nominative singular form.
Nominative form is the agreement controller in
subject-verb agreement. If case homophony and
distributional information influence agreement
production, then the proportion of singular verbs
with feminine nouns should be higher than with
masculine nouns.

• 40 Ss, native speakers of Serbian
• same methodology as for Exp. 1 (fragment
  completion task three cows)

Across different languages, it includes
properties such as number (3) The little
girl-SG. is-SG. beautiful. gender (4) La-FEM.
niña-FEM. pequeña-FEM. es linda-FEM. person (5)
She-3rd.P.SG. sings-3rd.P.SG. case (6) Gledam
malu-ACC. devojcicu-ACC. Im watching
the little girl.
The result of processing is determined by the
interaction of multiple graded, probabilistic
constraints (MacDonald et al., 1994 Trueswell
Tanenhaus, 1994 Haskell MacDonald, in press
Thornton MacDonald, in press)

• Results
• significantly more singular verb responses in
  preambles with masculine nouns
• more plural verb responses in preambles with
  feminine nouns (p0.088)
• equal distribution of miscellaneous responses in
  two genders

Experiment 1
Two Forms Grammatical
The focus of this study is subject-verb number
agreement production (for example, (1)).
Competition produces variability in responses!

• 40 Ss, native speakers of Serbian
• fragment completion task, with preambles with
  feminine or masculine nouns (e.g. five cows)

Agreement production is influenced by
distributional morpho-phonological factors, which
is in this case indicated by the increase of
agreement errors in masculine nouns.
Error-free Subject-Verb Agreement

• Results
• significantly more singular verb responses in
  preambles with feminine nouns
• miscellaneous responses are equally distributed
  across genders (i.e. the effect is not coming
  from comprehension difficulties)

Fragment completion task The subject is
presented with a sentence preamble like
Conclusions
the key to the cabinets
and is supposed to repeat it and complete the
sentence, e.g.

• Subject-verb agreement production can be
  influenced by morpho-phonological distributional
  information, when both one and more than one
  grammatical alternatives exist.
• Together with other results showing semantic
  (Thornton MacDonald, in press Vigliocco et
  al., 1996) and phonological (Haskell MacDonald,
  in press Hartsuiker et al, submitted) effects,
  our studies show that agreement production is
  well described in terms of a constraint
  satisfaction process.

the key to the cabinets is on the shelf
Sometimes the subjects produce attraction errors

• In Serbian (and possibly other Slavic languages)
  there is a construction where both singular and
  plural verb forms are allowed
• Quantifier NP
• 5 krava-GEN.PL. trce-PL./trci-SG.
• 5 cows run/runs
• Experiment 1 investigates the role of
  morphophonological factors in agreement
  production in this case.

Normal, error-free agreement production is
influenced by distributional morpho-phonological
factors homophony with nominative singular form
in feminine nouns promotes the use of singular
verbs.
Please see handout for references. Thanks to
Laboratory for Experimental Psychology,
University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
Montenegro This work is supported by NIH Grant
P50 MH 64445 and the Vilas Trust, UW-Madison.
? the subjects erroneously produce the verb that
agrees in number with the local noun, instead of
the head noun