Tracking irregular morphophonological dependencies in natural language: Evidence from the acquisition of subject-verb agreement in French

This study examines French-learning infants’ sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., le/les garçons lit/lisent ‘the boy(s) read(s)’) where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further particularity of this subsystem of French subject-verb agreement is that number marking on the verb is phonologically highly irregular. Despite the challenge, the HPP results for 24- and 18-month-olds demonstrate knowledge of both number dependencies: between the singular determiner le and the non-adjacent singular verbal forms and between the plural determiner les and the non-adjacent plural verbal forms. A control experiment suggests that the infants are responding to known verb forms, not phonological regularities. Given the paucity of such forms in the adult input documented through a corpus study, these results are interpreted as evidence that 18-month-olds have the ability to extract complex patterns across a range of morphophonologically inconsistent and infrequent items in natural language.

from Cognition

Brain response to subject-verb agreement during grammatical priming

In this study, we explored cerebral mechanisms during the computation of subject-verb agreement by measuring event-related potentials after French verb and pseudoverb targets preceded by various contexts. In auditory grammatical priming, the targets were either related to a congruent predictive pronoun prime (nous prêtons we lend) or an incongruent predictive pronoun prime (vous prêtons you lend) or a non predictive prime (zous prêtons zous lend). Whereas an early anterior negativity (LAN) and a parietal positivity were modulated by the preceding context for verb targets, only the early negativity was sensitive to the context for pseudoverb targets. Interestingly, for verbs, the LAN response was larger at left frontocentral sites around 100 msec after the onset of the recognition point of verbal inflection in the incongruent predictive condition relative to two other conditions. This finding was in line with the behavioral results, suggesting that top-down processes of the computation of the subject-verb agreement occur. Moreover, at 160-210 msec after the onset of the recognition point of verbal inflection, the parietal positivity was smaller in amplitude at left centroparietal sites for the incongruent predictive and non predictive conditions. This was interpreted as reflecting bottom-up processes of the computation of the subject-verb agreement. All findings thus suggest that top-down and bottom-up processes of the computation of the subject-verb agreement occur with distinctive temporal properties.

from Brain Research