The regulation of information flow between production levels: Grammatical agreement as an investigation tool.

This paper surveys the literature on grammatical agreement in order to synt hesise and distinguish theoretical arguments and experimental data relative to the maximal and minimal input hypotheses. The maximal input hypothesis assumes that during the construction of a syntactic frame for the sentence, the grammatical encoder takes advantage of any relevant information, i.e. information within the lexicon, but also from the conceptual and morphophon ological levels. In contrast, the minimal input hypothesis assumes that onl y a limited flow, of lexico-syntactic information reaches the grammatical e ncoder. Experimental data on adult performance in grammatical agreement tas ks are considered in different languages. Major differences are reported be tween English and romance languages like French, Italian and Spanish as to the question of the minimal vs. maximal input frameworks. It is suggested t hat contradictions between results have to be examined in the light of the variability within each language as well as between languages. We suggest t hat the use of a particular information (conceptual, lexical, morphophonolo gical) depends simultaneously on its validity and on its cost, with these t wo indexes varying both within and between languages.