With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Kathryn Bock will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the cognitive processes involved in producing number and gender agreement in normal spontaneous speech. The project will compare agreement in English, Dutch, and Russian using laboratory tasks that measure the accuracy, timing, locus of attention, and cognitive demands associated with the production of agreement in verbs and pronouns. The research addresses how speakers tacitly identify the conceptual and perceptual precursors of number and gender and tests competing views about how number and gender information are used when producing agreement under the typical time-pressures associated with speaking.
The devices of number and gender agreement are linguistic flags to the parts of sentences that belong together mentally, serving to bridge meaning and the grammatical form of the utterances that speakers use to express their thoughts. The bridge is well travelled: Even in English, a language with relatively simple agreement requirements, speakers call on the operations that implement agreement more than once in every five seconds of running speech. Also, despite intuitions to the contrary, agreement is surprisingly reliable. By the age of 4, the normal, spontaneous use of number agreement is almost 95% correct. The implication is that an explanation of the workings of agreement can enhance our currently negligible scientific understanding of how human perceptions and conceptions are transformed into a medium that allows them to be communicated with precision to other people.
