The Relation between Gender and Number Agreement Processing

We report an experiment in which we test the relationship between gender and number in subject-predicate agreement. We also test the link between two different number-agreement relations—subject-verb and subject-predicative adjective. Participants saw first an unmarked adjective and then a sentence fragment consisting of a complex subject with a head noun and a modifier containing a second noun and were asked to make a whole sentence using the adjective with the proper gender and number markings. The gender of the subject head and the gender and number of the attractor noun were manipulated. Number errors in the verb and number and gender errors in the predicative adjective were measured. The results suggest gender agreement is computed independently of number agreement. In contrast, subject-verb number agreement and subject-predicative adjective number agreement are a unitary process. The implications for psycholinguistic and linguistic theories of gender and number are discussed.

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