TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of morphology in subject-verb number agreement
T2 - A comparison of Mexican and Dominican Spanish
AU - Foote, Rebecca
AU - Bock, Kathryn
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Rebecca Foote, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Illinois, 4080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-176, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. E-mail: [email protected] The research reported in this article is based in part on the first author’s Ph.D. dissertation, completed at the University of Illinois. Thanks go to Silvina Montrul for her codirection of the dissertation. We also thank Jeanette López Walle at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in Monterrey, Mexico, and Rafaela Carrasco at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santiago, Dominican Republic, for their assistance in data collection. We are also grateful to Brad Dennison for providing us with phonological transcriptions of select participant responses. This research was supported by the University of Illinois Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant and by grants from the National Science Foundation (No. SBR 98-73450, BCS 02-14270) and the National Institutes of Health (No. R01-MH66089).
Copyright:
Copyright 2012 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2012/4
Y1 - 2012/4
N2 - The goal of the present study was to test the predictions of two contrasting claims about the role of morphology in subject-verb number agreement production. According to the maximalist view described by Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, and Kolk, languages with relatively rich inflectional morphology may be more susceptible to the influence of notional number due to the penetration of meaning into the agreement process. An alternative proposed by Eberhard, Cutting, and Bock predicts the opposite: Languages with richer inflectional morphology are less susceptible to notional number because inflectional morphemes filter the effect of number meaning. In the present experiments, utterances differing in notional number properties were elicited from speakers of two varieties of Spanish that vary in morphological richness. In Experiment 1, participants formed sentences with overt subjects. In Experiment 2, they produced sentences with null subjects. Results supported the hypothesis that richer morphology reduces notional effects during agreement production, both within and across languages.
AB - The goal of the present study was to test the predictions of two contrasting claims about the role of morphology in subject-verb number agreement production. According to the maximalist view described by Vigliocco, Hartsuiker, Jarema, and Kolk, languages with relatively rich inflectional morphology may be more susceptible to the influence of notional number due to the penetration of meaning into the agreement process. An alternative proposed by Eberhard, Cutting, and Bock predicts the opposite: Languages with richer inflectional morphology are less susceptible to notional number because inflectional morphemes filter the effect of number meaning. In the present experiments, utterances differing in notional number properties were elicited from speakers of two varieties of Spanish that vary in morphological richness. In Experiment 1, participants formed sentences with overt subjects. In Experiment 2, they produced sentences with null subjects. Results supported the hypothesis that richer morphology reduces notional effects during agreement production, both within and across languages.
KW - Agreement production
KW - Spanish
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U2 - 10.1080/01690965.2010.550166
DO - 10.1080/01690965.2010.550166
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84859195153
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 27
SP - 429
EP - 461
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 3
ER -