Proximity in agreement errors

Across languages subject-verb agreement errors have been established when subjects are producing complex (NP PP) noun-phrases (see Bock, 1995, for an overview). Very recently, Haskell & MacDonalds (2002) proposed a locality-based principle, the principle of proximity, to explain a variety of agreement errors in production. They base they argument partly on preferences in verb number marking in sentences with disjunctive noun phrases (e.g., "the hat and the gloves" vs. "the gloves and the hat"), where they found a preference for number marking that matched the local noun. We will present a series of five written production experiments on German constructions with disjunctive Subjects, NP PP Subjects and Subject-Object-verb subordinate clauses. We will show that although comparable effects can be established for German sentences with disjunctive Subjects a proximity based principle fails to cover major portions of the results. We propose an account that highlights the dynamics of plural-feature activation and percolation. Introduction It is well known by now that occasionally subjects erroneously produce plural verbs following a plural modifier in constructions like (1; quoted form Bock & Miller, 1991). (1) The readiness of our conventional forces are at an all-time low. The mechanism underlying this error is attributed to the marked plural feature percolating up the tree too far (Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998). This account is substantiated by the fact that no comparable singular/plural mismatch effect for constructions with marked plural heads has been established so far. ha l-0 01 42 95 7, v er si on 1 23 A pr 2 00 7 Author manuscript, published in " (2004)"