Agreement Processes in Sentence Comprehension

Three experiments examined the processing of subject–verb agreement in sentence comprehension. Experiment 1 used a word-by-word self-paced moving window reading methodology, and participants read sentences such as The key to the {cabinet/cabinets} {was/were} rusty from many years of disuse. When the head noun (key), local noun (cabinet), and verb were all singular, reading times after the verb were faster than when either a plural local noun or plural verb was present. Experiment 2 used an eyetracking paradigm and revealed a pattern like that in Experiment 1, with a finer grain of resolution. Agreement computations influenced processing within one word after encountering the verb, and processing disruptions occurred in response to both agreement violations and locally distracting number-marked nouns, despite the fact that neither is a priori relevant for comprehension in English. Experiment 3 revealed an asymmetry in the pattern of disruptions that parallels error distributions in language production (e.g., Bock & Miller, 1991). The results suggest that agreement is an early, integral component of comprehension, mediated by processes similar to those of production. © 1999 Academic Press