How spelling influences grammatical agreement

Julie Franck^1,2, Jeffrey Bowers³
Uli Frauenfelder², Gabriella Vigliocco⁴
franck@exco.ucl.ac.be, j.bowers@bristol.ac.uk
Ulrich.Frauenfelder@pse.unige.ch, g.vigliocco@ucl.ac.uk
1 Université de Louvain
2 Université de Genève
3 University of Bristol
4 University College London

Agreement has been widely used as a tool to shed light on the question of the penetrability of syntactic operations to non-syntactic information. Both conceptual and morphophonological effects have been reported, although to a different extent, in many languages like French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and English (e.g. Vigliocco et al., 1995; Meyer & Bock, 1998, Vigliocco & Franck, 1999; Franck et al., 1999). A related important question which has not been addressed to-date concerns whether orthographical information also affects grammatical agreement.

We report two studies that assess the impact of orthographic marking of the subject's number on subject-verb agreement in spoken and written French. Materials for the experiments included subject head nouns with homophone but non homograph singular and plural forms (e.g., fumée, smoke-S vs. fumées-smokes-P) and subject heads with homophone and homograph singular and plural forms (e.g., repas, meal-S vs. repas, meal-P). While in the first case number is marked orthographically, in the latter case number can be considered orthographically unmarked. In the spoken experiment, sentence preambles were orally presented to the participants who were asked to repeat and complete them to produce a full sentence. Preambles contained a head noun (S or P) and a local noun (S or P):

(1)

La fumée des cheminées (The-S smoke-S of the-P chimneys-P)
Le repas des cantines (The-S meal-0 of the-P refectories-P)

In the written experiment, the experimenter orally presented the same preambles, completed with an intransitive verb that did not bear any phonological mark and participants were required to write the sentences, under dictation.

(2)

La fumée des cheminées empeste (The-S smoke-S of the-P chimneys-P stinks-0)
Le repas des cantines rassasie (The-S meal-0 of the-P refectories-P fills-0)

An effect of the orthographical representation of number was found in written production, with more errors for preambles in which the subject noun was orthographically unmarked. No effect was found in oral production. The results speak for modality-specific feedback influences during grammatical encoding: orthographical representations influence written production whereas, as previously reported, morphophonological representations influence oral production (Franck et al., 1999).

References

Franck, J., Collina, S., & Vigliocco, G. (1999). Gender agreement in language production II: When morpho-phonology hits syntax, in A. Vandierendonck, M. Brysbaert, K. Van der Goten (Eds), Eleventh Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Gent, ESCoP/Academia Press, 245.

Meyer, A., & Bock, J.K. (1998). Representations and processes in the production of pronouns: Some perspectives from Dutch. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 281-301.

Vigliocco, G., Butterworth, B., & Semenza, C. (1995). Constructing subject-verb agreement in Speech : The role of semantic and morphological factors. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 186-215.

Vigliocco, G., & Franck, J. (1999). When sex and syntax go hand in hand: Gender agreement in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 455-478.