Language Production and Working Memory: The Case of Subject-Verb Agreement

Autor/inn/en	Hartsuiker, Robert J.; Barkhuysen, Pashiera N.
Titel	Language Production and Working Memory: The Case of Subject-Verb Agreement
Quelle	In: Language and Cognitive Processes, 21 (2006) 1-3, S.181-204 (24 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0169-0965
Schlagwörter	Oral Language; Sentence Structure; Nouns; Grammar; Memory; Error Analysis (Language); Language Processing; Comparative Analysis + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Oral interpretation; Mündlicher Sprachgebrauch; Satzbau; Satzstruktur; Grammatik; Gedächtnis; Error analysis; Language; Fehleranalyse; Sprachverarbeitung
Abstract	In order to study the role of working memory in sentence formulation, we elicited errors of subject-verb agreement in spoken sentence completion, while speakers did or did not maintain an extrinsic memory load (a word list). We compared participants with low and high speaking spans (a measure of verbal working memory for sentence production). As in previous studies, agreement errors occurred more frequently for sentence fragments with a singular subject noun and a plural noun than for corresponding fragments in which both nouns were singular. Agreement errors also occurred more frequently when the fragment had a distributive interpretation, so that the conceptual number of the subject mismatched its grammatical number, than when the fragment was not distributive. Importantly, there were effects of memory span and of memory load, and these variables interacted: Load affected only low-span speakers. Distributivity did not interact with either load or span. These data establish that a pivotal syntactic planning process is affected by verbal working memory limitations. As such, they constrain existing proposals about the role of working memory in language production. (Author).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10