Vigliocco G, Butterworth B, Garrett M F
University of Trieste, Italy.
Cognition. 1996 Dec;61(3):261-98. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(96)00713-5.
This paper reports studies of subject-verb agreement errors with speakers of Spanish and English; we used a sentence completion task, first introduced by Bock and Miller (1991). In a series of four experiments, we assessed the role of semantic information carried by the sentential subject in the induction of subject-verb agreement errors. For Spanish speakers, a sentence preamble such as la etiqueta score las botellas (the label on the bottles), which is usually interpreted to denote several labels, induced more agreement errors than preambles that normally denote a single entity. This finding replicates previous research with Italian (Vigliocco et al., 1995). English speakers, on the other hand, were not sensitive to this semantic dimension, as was found earlier by Bock and Miller (1991). This cross-linguistic difference is discussed in the framework of a modified version of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp (1987). In this version of the model agreement is computed through a unification operation instead of feature-copying, allowing for an independent retrieval of agreement features from the conceptual representation for the subject and the verb. We propose that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the subject and features from the conceptual representation.
本文报告了关于西班牙语和英语使用者主谓一致错误的研究；我们采用了由博克和米勒（1991年）首次提出的句子完成任务。在一系列的四个实验中，我们评估了句子主语所携带的语义信息在主谓一致错误诱导中的作用。对于说西班牙语的人来说，诸如“la etiqueta score las botellas”（瓶子上的标签）这样的句子前言，通常被解释为表示多个标签，与通常表示单个实体的前言相比，会引发更多的一致错误。这一发现重复了之前对意大利语的研究（维廖科等人，1995年）。另一方面，说英语的人对这一语义维度不敏感，这一点博克和米勒（1991年）早前就已发现。这种跨语言差异在肯彭和霍恩坎普（1987年）提出的语法编码计算模型的修改版本框架内进行了讨论。在该模型的这个版本中，一致关系是通过统一操作而不是特征复制来计算的，这使得能够从主语和动词的概念表征中独立检索一致特征。我们提出，不同语言在动词选择受主语特征和概念表征特征控制的程度上存在差异。
