Accounting for semantic integration: notional and grammatical effects in number agreement

Notional and grammatical number affect agreement in language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces changes in agreement (Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). Notional and lexical-grammatical number offer alternative accounts of these effects. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number agreement reflect differences in referential coherence: More coherence yields more singularity. The lexical-grammatical hypothesis is that changes in agreement arise from competition between nouns differing in grammatical number: More competition yields more plurality. These hypotheses make opposing predictions about semantic integration. On the notional hypothesis, semantic integration promotes singular agreement. On the lexical-grammatical hypothesis, semantic integration promotes plural agreement. We tested these hypotheses with agreement elicitation tasks in three experiments. All three experiments supported the notional hypothesis, with semantic integration or notional plurality creating faster and more frequent singular agreement. This implies that referential coherence mediates the effect of semantic integration on number agreement

Speed limits and red flags: why number agreement accidents happen

Trouble in language production sometimes surfaces in errors and sometimes surfaces in delays. Since these two symptoms of difficulty can trade off, theories may make predictions that are confirmed with measures of accuracy but disconfirmed with measures of speed, and vice-versa. In work on grammatical agreement in particular, there are accounts of variability in verb number production that emphasize the roles of lexical sources of number information and accounts that emphasize structural sources. Depending on whether speed or accuracy is measured these alternative views can differ in the success of their predictions. To evaluate the alternatives, we carried out six experiments gauging speed and accuracy together in producing agreement. The data were analyzed using a statistical method that integrates speed and accuracy into a coherent framework. The findings demonstrate that grammatical agreement mechanisms are substantially more sensitive to conceptual than to lexical forces, confirming a central hypothesis of a structural account of sentence production

What counts in grammatical number agreement?

a b s t r a c t Both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces variations in agreemen

Transient blend states and discrete agreement-driven errors in sentence production

Errors in subject-verb agreement are common in everyday language production. This has been studied using a preamble completion task in which a participant hears or reads a preamble containing inflected nouns and forms a complete English sentence (“The key to the cabinets” could be completed as The key to the cabinets is gold. ) Existing work has focused on errors arising in selecting the correct verb form for production in the presence of a more ‘local’ noun with different number features (The key to the cabinets are gold). However, the same paradigm elicits substantial numbers of preamble errors ( The key to the cabinets repeated as The key to the cabinet ) that existing theories have largely failed to address. We propose a Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) account of agreement and preamble errors. Sentence processing is modeled as a continuous-time, continuous-state stochastic dynamical system. Within this continuous representational space, a subset of states reflect discrete symbolic structures. The remainder are blend states where multiple symbols are simultaneously partially active. Initial phases of computation prefer blend states; an additional dynamic control parameter, commitment strength, pushes the model to discrete structures. This process, combined with stochastic gradient ascent dynamics respecting grammatical constraints on syntactic structures, yields discrete sentence outputs. We propose that transient blend states allow portions of target and non-target syntactic structures to interact, yielding both verb and preamble errors

PWTS data

These are data, stimuli, and scripts from the PWTS paper

IJoint data

Data, stimuli, and analysis scripts from Brehm, L., Taschenberger, L., & Meyer, A. S. (2019). Mental representations of partner task cause interference in picture naming. Acta Psychologica, 199: 102888. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102888

False memory for picture naming

Stimuli, data, and scripts from AI studies (false memory in picture naming)

Memory for overheard conversations

Stimuli, data, and scripts from AKO studies (memory for overheard conversations)

Planning When To Say

Stimuli, data, and scripts from Planning When To Say paper (cross-validation in turn-taking)