Subject-verb agreement in Spanish and English: differences in the role of conceptual constraints

This paper reports studies of subject-verb agreement errors with speakers of Spanish and English; we used a sentence completion task, first introduced by Bock and Miller (1991). In a series of four experiments, we assessed the role of semantic information carried by the sentential subject in the induction of subject-verb agreement errors. For Spanish speakers, a sentence preamble such as la etiqueta sobre las botellas (the label on the bottles), which is usually interpreted to denote several labels, induced more agreement errors than preambles that normally denote a single entity. This finding replicates previous research with Italian (Vigliocco et al., 1995). English speakers, on the other hand, were not sensitive to this semantic dimension, as was found earlier by Bock and Miller (1991). This cross-linguistic difference is discussed in the framework of a modified version of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp (1987). In this version of the model agreement is computed through a unification operation instead of feature-copying, allowing for an independent retrieval of agreement features from the conceptual representation for the subject and the verb. We propose that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the subject and features from the conceptual representation.