SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT PROCESSES IN COMPREHENSION

Studies of elicited sentence production show that the occasional subje ct-verb agreement errors that speakers make are more likely to occur w hen a singular head noun is followed by a plural, as in The producer o f the adventure movies have arrived, than when a plural head is follow ed by a singular (e.g., Beck & Miller, 1991). The significance of this asymmetric pattern of errors depends on whether interference from plu rals arises only during the production of sentences, or whether it als o occurs in sentence comprehension tasks. Five reading experiments rev ealed the following: (1) patterns of reading times mirror the producti on error asymmetry; (2) a phrase which is conceptually plural but gram matically singular (e.g., The label on the bottles) produces no more r eading difficulty than one which is conceptually and grammatically sin gular, a result which mimics Beck and Miller's 1991 production results ; (3) interference from an intervening plural depends on a close synta ctic link to the head noun phrase (e.g., The owner of the house who ch armed the realtors). These results suggest that although the computati on of agreement may be accomplished differently in the two systems, in terference may arise whenever a structure containing a singular head a nd intervening plural is computed, whether during production or compre hension. (C) 1997 Academic Press.