Oral cues improve subject-verb agreement in written French

The aim of this study was to test the impact of an audible marker on the production of subject-verb agreements. Earlier studies have shown that educated French-speaking adults make subject-verb agreement errors when writing as soon as a secondary task demands their attention. One hypothesis is that these errors occur primarily because in French many of the written inflections of the verbal plural are silent. However, errors of the same type have been reported in spoken English: in configurations such as "the dog of the neighbours arrive(s)", arrive agrees with the noun closest to the verb rather than with the subject. The current experiment compares the production of subject-verb agreements in written French depending on whether the singular/ plural opposition is audible (finit / finissent) or not (chante / chantent). After having changed the tense of the verb, adult subjects had to recall, in writing, sentences which had been read aloud to them and which shared the same start (La flamme de la bougie = th...

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