Download Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs

Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Journal of
Memory and
Language
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Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs
Kathryn Bock,a,* Kathleen M. Eberhard,b and J. Cooper Cuttingc
a
Beckman Institute, University of Illinois, 405 North Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
b
University of Notre Dame, USA
c
Illinois State University, USA
Received 13 February 2004; revision received 24 April 2004
Available online 28 May 2004
Abstract
The major targets of number agreement in English are pronouns and verbs. To examine the factors that control
pronoun number and to test pronouns against a psycholinguistic account of how verb number arises during language
production, we varied the meaningful and grammatical number properties of agreement controllers and examined the
impact of these variations on the number values of pronouns in sentence completion tasks. The number values taken by
pronouns were systematically compared to the number values taken by verbs over the same range of conditions. The
findings supported the hypothesis that pronouns acquire number lexically while verbs acquire it syntactically, with
differently weighted contributions from number meaning. In contrast, pronouns were just as vulnerable as verbs to the
effects of number attraction, suggesting that the mechanisms responsible for reconciling number features within utterances work in the same way for pronouns as for verbs. The results imply that the transformation of notional number
into linguistic number (what we call marking) may be dissociable from the implementation of number agreement during
language production (what we call morphing).
Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Unlike most syntactic phenomena in language,
number agreement links a salient, nontrivial semantic
categorization (one involving number) to a salient,
nontrivial grammatical system (one involving dependencies among the parts of utterances). In English, the
most familiar kinds of number agreement involve verbs
with their subjects and pronouns with their antecedents.
In this work, we examine how an account of subject–
verb number agreement in normal language performance fares in predicting some of the workings of
English pronoun number, to assess whether and how
these two kinds of agreement make use of the same
mechanisms of language performance.
Apart from their number properties, verbs and pronouns seem to have little in common. The processes
behind pronoun use tend to be explained in pragmatic
*
Corresponding author. Fax: 1-217-244-8371.
E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Bock).
terms (Garnham, 2001), except for reflexive pronouns
such as himself in John shaved himself (these are the
bound pronouns called anaphors in formal linguistics;
Chomsky, 1981). In contrast, the processes that yield
verb number are traditionally regarded as a facet of
grammar. To assess the properties that verb and pronoun number might share, we experimentally evaluated
predictions from an expanded marking and morphing
account of verb agreement (Bock, Eberhard, Cutting,
Meyer, & Schriefers, 2001; Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock,
2004) against the behavior of pronouns.
We start with some puzzles in the number behavior
of verbs and pronouns. We then sketch an explanation
of these puzzles in terms of an account of agreement
implementation. On this account, shared number
meanings can initiate number agreement and shared
linguistic mechanisms can complete the morphological
realization of number on verbs and pronouns. The major differences between verbs and pronouns in their
agreement properties arise within the transition from
0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jml.2004.04.005
252
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
meaning to morphology, when the linguistic raw materials for verb and pronoun number are separately assembled.
We then report five experiments that compared
number agreement on pronouns to number agreement
on verbs across parallel conditions. Throughout, we use
the terms subject and subject noun phrase to mean the
subject noun phrase as a whole, including postmodifying
and adjoined phrases. So, The keys to the cabinet constitutes the subject of the sentence The keys to the cabinet
were lost. The head of the subject noun phrase refers to
the noun whose grammatical number is typically the
same as that of the verb (keys in the example); the local
noun is the noun phrase within a postmodifying or adjoined phrases (i.e., the cabinet). We use the term antecedent to refer to noun phrases with which a subsequent
pronoun is co-referential. An agreement controller (the
subject of a verb or the antecedent of a pronoun) carries
a number with which an agreement target (a verb or
pronoun) typically agrees.
The main similarity between pronoun and verb
number in English is clear: Pronoun number and verb
number both seem to have something to do with a distinction between ‘‘one thing’’ and ‘‘more than one
thing.’’ Setting aside the exceptionally complicated
problem of how people make such a categorization, this
similarity between pronouns and verbs suggests that
both types of agreement are rooted in information about
numerosity, potentially the same kinds of information
about numerosity. In particular, if verbs and pronouns
both depend directly or indirectly on a one vs. morethan-one semantic distinction, both might be expected to
carry the same types of one vs. more-than-one information under the same circumstances, with the same
values (singular or plural).
Unfortunately for parsimony, verb and pronoun
number do not always work this way. It is well known in
linguistics that pronouns are more likely than verbs to
reflect the notional properties of controllers (or conversely, that verbs are more likely than pronouns to
reflect the grammatical properties of controllers), consistent with the view that pronoun number has a greater
pragmatic component. This has been described in what
is known as the Agreement Hierarchy (see Corbett,
2000, for review and discussion). Verb and pronoun
number can even differ when a verbÕs subject and a
pronounÕs antecedent seem to be the same. For instance,
in ‘‘Has everybody got their floors?’’ (said in an elevator)
the verb (has) is singular while the pronoun (their) is
plural. Because such usages can be infelicitous by prescriptive standards, examples are easy to find in the
sightlines of pundits (dubbed ‘‘The Language Police’’ by
Pinker, 1994) who view them as errors. Here, our point
is merely that pronoun number and verb number can
differ even when they conceivably have the same semantic origins.
A simple hypothesis about such disparities in verb
and pronoun number is in terms of natural distributional differences in verb and pronoun agreement. The
distributional differences are associated with different
temporal and structural distances between subjects and
verbs, on the one hand, and antecedents and pronouns
on the other. Verbs tend to immediately follow their
controllers (their subjects); pronouns do not immediately follow their antecedents. Verbs are controlled by
elements in the same clause; pronouns can be controlled
by antecedents in different clauses and by referents in the
extralinguistic context. When the antecedents of pronouns are in different sentences or clauses, they are less
likely to display the grammatical features of their controllers (Meyer & Bock, 1999). Given these distributional differences, linguistic binding principles imply that
only reflexive pronouns should behave like verbs (Anderson, 1992; den Dikken, 2000).
However, the reduction of distributional differences
does not reduce agreement variations. Bock, Nicol, and
Cutting (1999) elicited verbs and structurally bound
(reflexive) as well as unbound (tag) pronouns in the
completions of sentences that began with the same collective subjects. The subjects, such as The crowd at the
Olympic event, functioned as number controllers for
verbs in one condition and as antecedents for reflexive
and tag pronouns in two other conditions, yielding
spoken sentences like (1)–(3):
1. The crowd at the Olympic event was cheering wildly.
(verb completion)
2. The crowd at the Olympic event enjoyed themselves.
(reflexive pronoun completion)
3. The crowd at the Olympic event waited, didnÕt they?
(tag pronoun completion)
Reflexive pronouns (as in 2) occurred in the same clauses
as their antecedents, whereas tag pronouns occurred in
different clauses (as in 3). Because of this, a distributional account of verb–pronoun differences predicts that
reflexive pronouns should behave more like verbs with
respect to number agreement, and less like tag pronouns.
The results showed that, relative to controls, pronouns of both kinds were much more likely to exhibit
plural agreement than verbs (70% plural pronouns to
34% plural verbs). Most striking was that the levels of
plural agreement for pronouns were virtually identical
for reflexives (69%) and tags (70%). This is evidence for
a genuine difference between pronouns and verbs in
number agreement, one that cannot easily be explained
in terms of distributional properties or whether a pronoun is bound or unbound.
An alternative account of the differences between
verb and pronoun number derives from the character
of the effective number information. One type of
number information is notional, and represents a
speakerÕs valuation of numerosity in the world or in a
mental model. For English, it might be the product of
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
a categorization of an intended referent as ‘‘one thing’’
or ‘‘more than one thing.’’ Another type of number
information is grammatical number, which is the conventional linguistic singularity or plurality of a noun.
The grammatical number of scissors is plural, even
though the normal referent of the word is rated as
notionally singular (Bock et al., 2001). The grammatical number of news is singular, even though a typical
referent of news is notionally plural. The word even
looks plural. The distinction between notional and
grammatical number is analogous to the distinction
between natural and grammatical gender in grammatical gender languages, such as Dutch and Spanish. In
such languages, the normal referent of a word can be
biologically female (for example) while the word itself
is neuter (as is meisje [girl] in Dutch).
Given this difference, it makes sense to suppose that
pronouns are generally influenced by notional number
and verbs by grammatical number. Such an account also
does better in accounting for the results of Bock et al.Õs
(1999) experiment, where the head nouns of subject
noun phrases in the critical conditions were grammatically singular collective nouns, such as crowd. A pertinent feature of collectives is that they refer to groups: A
crowd, an army, an audience, and so on consist of
multiple individuals. This makes the notional number of
collectives ambiguous. On one reading, a collective may
denote a singular set (e.g. a crowd as a whole; this is the
collective reading), and on the other, it may denote the
several individuals constituting the set (e.g. a crowd as
comprised of many separate people; this is the distributive reading). Despite this notional ambiguity, the
grammatical number of most collectives, most of the
time, for most American English speakers, is singular (in
contrast to British English; Bock et al., 2004). If pronouns and verbs are variably affected by different kinds
of number, with notional number more likely to control
pronoun agreement and grammatical number more
likely to control verb agreement, Bock et al.Õs (1999)
results would follow.
If this is right, differences between pronouns and
verbs should consistently arise whenever notional and
grammatical number diverge. The experiments below
were designed to test this hypothesis across a range of
conditions that are known to affect verb number, including normal subject–verb agreement and attraction.
In attraction, a verb spuriously agrees with the number
of a neighboring noun phrase that is not its usual (or its
entire) controller. This occurs most often when the
neighbor is plural, as in The time for fun and games are
over. In this example, the head noun (time) is singular,
while the verb (are) is plural. The neighbors responsible
for attraction are the local nouns, and their effects occur
over and above the effects of notional number on
agreement (Bock et al., 1999). For verbs, attraction
appears to be triggered by interlopers that are gram-
253
matically plural: It does not seem to happen with interlopers that are merely notional plurals (such as
collective nouns; Bock & Eberhard, 1993). Similarly,
Vigliocco and Franck (1999) found that notional
support for the grammatical gender of local nouns
in French did not change the magnitude of gender
attraction.
In their controlled comparison of verb and pronoun
number, Bock et al. (1999) found that pronouns exhibited the same patterns of attraction as verbs, with no
more attraction for pronouns than for verbs. Specifically, there was an increased tendency for pronouns to
be produced as plurals after plural local nouns, and the
magnitude of this increase was equivalent to the increase
for verbs. It occurred even when the subject was unambiguously (i.e., both notionally and grammatically)
singular, which implies spurious control of pronoun
number by a grammatically plural interloper. In short,
whereas pronouns tended to be plural more often than
verbs were when their controllers were collective nouns,
they were no more likely than verbs to be plural after
plural local nouns.
Of course, grammatical plurals tend to be notional
plurals, and Bock et al. did not vary the notional
properties of the local nouns. It could be that pronouns
capture the notionally plural properties of plural interlopers, as Bock et al. (1999) proposed. If it just so
happens that the magnitude of notional attraction is
identical to the magnitude of grammatical attraction,
this result would be consistent with the hypothesis that
pronouns are consistently sensitive to notional number.
Further support for the hypothesis would come from
dissociations in the attraction patterns for pronouns and
verbs created by contrasts in the notional and grammatical number of local nouns. This would make a
strong case for uniform notional control of pronoun
number.
This sort of notional control would accord well with
proposals that notional (as well as conceptual and
phonological) information pervades or is continuously
accessible to agreement processes (Thornton & MacDonald, 2003; Vigliocco & Franck, 1999, 2001; Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002). For instance, on Thornton
and MacDonaldÕs constraint-based view of agreement,
‘‘factors should modulate agreement processes to the
extent that they have been reliably correlated with the
use of a particular verb form’’ (p. 742). One prediction
from this account is that similar factors should affect
agreement and attraction: The features of head nouns
that normally influence agreement should have similar
effects when they occur as features of local nouns, creating attraction. The strength of the influence from local
nouns may be weaker, because position is also a constraint that must be reckoned with, but the same types of
constraints would be expected to matter. Applied to
pronoun number, attraction to the notional number of
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K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
local nouns makes sense if pronoun number is normally
correlated with notional number.
A different set of predictions about the number behavior of pronouns and verbs comes from an extension
of the marking-and-morphing account of verb agreement. Marking-and-morphing posits two mechanisms
that affect verb number, which are illustrated in Fig. 1
within a general framework for language production.
The first mechanism, marking, establishes abstract
number features on an abstract representation for
the sentence subject. These number features indicate the
results of number categorization (valuation) in the
message, and they can differ from the eventual grammatical number. For instance, the initial marking for a
subject such as the scissors might be singular and for a
subject such as the furniture might be plural. The crowd
around the celebrity could be marked as either singular
or plural depending on whether the crowd is construed
as a single group or as multiple individuals. Likewise,
the marking of his brother and best friend can be either
singular or plural depending on whether the referent is
one person or two. In essence, marking preserves number meaning in the linguistic root of the subject noun
phrase.
The second mechanism, morphing, calculates grammatical agreement features on the basis of the morphological specifications of words selected to occur
within phrases. Morphological number features can
differ from initially marked features, and a reconciliation
of their values is needed for fluent agreement (as in the
unification process described by Vigliocco, Butterworth,
& Garrett, 1996). For instance, a singular marking of the
scissors must be overridden by the grammatical plurality
of scissors. Although grammatical number generally
dominates morphing (see Bock et al., 2001), when a
marked number is plural and there is no specified
grammatical number on relevant morphemes, the
marked number is relatively likely to control agreement.
Roughly, marking is why The gang on the motorcycles is
more likely to take a plural verb than The gang near the
motorcycles (as shown by Humphreys & Bock, in press),
because The gang on the motorcycles is more likely than
The gang near the motorcycles to be construed distributively. In contrast, morphing is why The tweezers takes
a plural verb even when there is just one implement.
On this account, morphing is also responsible for
attraction. The reconciled number of a subject phrase
controls any agreement processes into which the subject
enters after reconciliation has occurred. When number
features from local nouns make their way into the reconciliation process, tripping the resulting value to a
number that is neither the originally marked value nor
the specified value of the head noun, attraction surfaces.
Two properties of attraction follow from its origins in
Fig. 1. Overview of the components of number formulation in language production.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
reconciliation. First, attraction is more likely for specified plural local nouns because only the grammatical
specifications of words in locally adjoined phrases enter
into reconciliation with marked values, and in English,
only plural morphemes reliably seem to have specifications (what is often called markedness; see Corbett,
2000). Second, the strength of attraction varies with the
structural depth of local nouns (Bock & Cutting, 1992;
Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998; Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol,
2002; Solomon & Pearlmutter, in press) because only the
morphological properties of the words and not their
meanings matter to reconciliation. Eberhard et al. (2004)
modeled this reconciliation in terms akin to a spreading
activation process within a structured network, using
only marking, plural specifications, and structural depth
as parameters.
The major prediction from this account is that pronouns, like verbs, should not be vulnerable to attraction
from the notional number of local nouns. This would
make pronouns pattern with verbs in attraction not
because of pronounsÕ sensitivity to a compensating
source of number (notional rather than grammatical),
but because of insensitivity to notional number at the
point when attraction occurs. The alternative is that
pronouns across the board are more sensitive to notional number properties than verbs are, tending
strongly to reflect the notional properties not only of
their intended antecedents but also, in attraction, of
local noun phrases. This would be consistent with the
constraint-based view of agreement outlined by Thornton and MacDonald (2003) applied to pronouns; results
in line with the marking and morphing prediction would
dispute such a view.
To test these competing predictions about pronoun
number, we examined the incidence of singular and
plural pronouns compared to singular and plural verbs
in similar sentence contexts. Rather than looking for
rare cases of overt disagreement between verb and pronoun number, we created comparable environments for
verb and pronoun agreement, and examined the differences that arose between verb and pronoun number
within those similar environments.
For verbs, we assessed the number agreement that
was used when speakers created a sentence with a designated subject, a preamble, such as The army with the
incompetent commanders. To make a complete sentence
using this subject, a verb is required. When a speaker
employs a verb that displays number (e.g., The army
with the incompetent commanders was or The army with
the incompetent commanders were), the verb presumably
reveals the subjectÕs number.
For pronouns, we examined the number used with
exactly the same subjects, now serving as pronominal
antecedents. We elicited tag pronouns, which are pronouns in questions such as The dogs barked, didn’t they?
Tag pronouns agree in number and gender with the
255
subject of the previous clause. However, being outside of
the previous clause, and in fact being the subjects of
their own clauses, their binding properties differ from
those of reflexives in formal syntactic theory (Chomsky,
1981). Though Bock et al. (1999) found reflexive and tag
pronouns to be the same in susceptibility to plural attraction (as well as in sensitivity to notional plurality),
the difference between tag pronouns and verbs in clause
membership makes them less likely, prima facie, to reflect the same agreement mechanisms that verbs do. Tag
pronouns thus constitute a more challenging test than
reflexivies for marking and morphing predictions about
similarities between verb and pronoun attraction.
Pronouns were elicited by presenting preambles
containing the designated subjects along with intransitive verbs. The verbs lacked overt number morphology,
bearing only past-tense inflections that are compatible
with both singular and plural number (e.g., The dog
barked; The dogs barked). This allows for variations in
pronoun number that might otherwise be unlikely, such
as The army with the incompetent commanders retreated,
didn’t it ? and The army with the incompetent commanders retreated, didn’t they ?
The experiments compared the rate of pronoun attraction to the rate of verb attraction when semantic
properties associated with the subject as a whole (assumed to reflect the underlying notional number) were
controlled. Various properties associated with lexical–
grammatical number features (number specifications)
were manipulated, including simple singular and plural
number (Experiment 1), collective singulars and plurals
(Experiments 2 and 3), and invariant plurals (Experiment 5).
Extending Bock et al. (1999), the experiments also
examined the consequences for agreement of having a
subject controller (for verbs) or antecedent (for pronouns) with discordant notional and grammatical
number stemming from the properties of head nouns.
This should precipitate differences between verbs and
pronouns if what matters most to pronoun number are
properties of the intended referent of the subject as a
whole, whereas what matters most to verb number are
grammatical number properties of heads. We investigated this in Experiments 3–5.
To build squarely from existing findings about verb
number, the experiments incorporated replications of
experiments on verb agreement from the literature and
used parallel materials for the pronouns. With one exception, the verb-eliciting conditions were replications of
previous work. The exception was Experiment 2, for
which the verb data were drawn from Bock and Eberhard (1993, Experiment 4). We omitted this replication
because the pronoun materials had been tested with
participants from the same source during the same period of time, as in all the other experiments. Since every
replication duplicated previous findings, there was no
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K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
reason to believe that the verbs in Experiment 2 would
do otherwise.
The two sets of predictions for all of the experiments
can be briefly stated. First, when the notional and
grammatical number properties of subjects diverge,
constraint-based and marking and morphing accounts
of agreement both predict that verbs and pronouns
should reflect some sensitivity to notional number. From
the linguistic evidence summarized in the Agreement
Hierarchy (Corbett, 2000) and the results of Bock et al.
(1999), we can further predict that pronouns should be
more notionally sensitive than verbs. As shorthand, we
call these the agreement predictions. Second, when the
notional and grammatical number properties of local
nouns diverge, the constraint-based hypothesis predicts
patterns of notional sensitivity that parallel those observed for head nouns, for both verbs and pronouns.
The marking-and-morphing hypothesis predicts predominantly grammatical sensitivity, for both verbs and
pronouns. These are the attraction predictions.
Experiment 1
The goal of the first experiment was to examine the
effects on pronouns of simple variations in grammatical
number that are well known to create a particular pattern of attraction for verbs. This was done while
avoiding consistent conflicts between the grammatical
and notional number properties of the subjects, to assess
whether pronoun agreement and attraction behave
similarly to verb agreement and attraction in the absence
of such conflicts.
A key feature of attraction is the singular–plural
asymmetry that arises from plural specification (Eberhard, 1997). Empirically, this asymmetry is manifested
in the production of plural verbs after plural local nouns
(the plural attraction seen in The key to the cabinets are
missing) with no corresponding tendency to produce
singular verbs after singular local nouns (The keys to the
cabinet is missing rarely occurs). The account for this
asymmetry is found in the different specifications of
plural and singular agreement controllers, plural count
nouns being specified and singular count nouns not. In
Experiment 1, pronouns as well as verbs should exhibit
the asymmetry. To test this, we examined all combina-
tions of singular and plural nouns in head as well as
local-noun positions.
The verb-elicitation materials were taken from Bock
and Miller (1991) and the pronoun-elicitation materials
were constructed from them. This yielded matched sets
of preambles for eliciting verbs (e.g., The key to the
cabinet) and tag pronouns (e.g., The key to the cabinet
disappeared). There were four versions of each verb and
pronoun preamble, two with heads and local nouns that
mismatched in number and two control versions in
which the heads and local nouns were both singular or
both plural. Any agreement variations that occurred on
the controls could be attributed to something other than
number conflicts, allowing us to discount various biases
and other extraneous sources of variability not reliably
linked to the calculation of number agreement.
Method
Participants
The participants were 128 Michigan State University
undergraduates who received extra credit in introductory psychology courses in return for volunteering for
the experiment. All were native English speakers.
Materials
The materials for the sentence completion tasks
consisted of 32 sets of preambles from Bock and Miller
(1991, Experiment 1). Every set included two types of
preambles, one for eliciting verb completions and another for pronoun completions. The pronoun-eliciting
preambles were the same as the verb-eliciting preambles
except for the addition of an intransitive past-tense verb
at the end. For both types, the four versions of each
preamble set varied only in the grammatical number of
the head and local nouns: Two preambles had head and
local nouns that matched in number (both singular or
both plural), and two had head and local nouns that
mismatched in number (singular heads with plural local
nouns or vice-versa). Table 1 gives a sample item in each
of its eight versions, and the appendix lists the complete
item set.
The materials included 56 filler preambles. The fillers
were simple noun phrases (determiner-noun or determiner-adjective–noun), half singular and half plural.
The pronoun-eliciting versions of the fillers were created
Table 1
Sample preamble sets for Experiment 1
Number of
head noun
Singular
Singular
Plural
Plural
Number of
local noun
Singular
Plural
Singular
Plural
Agreement target
Verb
The
The
The
The
key to the cabinet
key to the cabinets
keys to the cabinet
keys to the cabinets
Tag pronoun
The
The
The
The
key to the cabinet disappeared
key to the cabinets disappeared
keys to the cabinet disappeared
keys to the cabinets disappeared
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
by adding either the past tense form of an intransitive
verb (for 12 fillers) or the past tense of a transitive verb
plus an object noun phrase (for 44 fillers). Half of the
transitive fillers ended with singular object noun phrases
and half with plural object noun phrases.
All of the experimental and filler preambles were
digitally recorded by a female speaker of American
English at a sampling rate of 20 kHz. The recordings
were then edited (using a visual display of the waveform
along with its audio playback) to remove silent intervals
and create a faster rate of speech that remained clear and
natural. The recordings were reconverted to analog form
and recorded onto audio-cassette tape in the order
specified by their list assignments.
There were four lists of preambles for the verbcompletion task, and another four for the pronouncompletion task, with the lists for both tasks following
the same plan. Every list contained 32 experimental
preambles, one from each of the 32 sets. Within the lists,
eight preamble versions represented each of the four
head- and local-noun-number combinations, and across
the lists, each version of every preamble set occurred just
once. All 56 fillers occurred on every list.
Each list began with eight randomly arranged fillers
(four with singular and four with plural head nouns).
The arrangement of the remaining filler and experimental preambles was random, with the constraints that
no experimental preambles could occur consecutively
and the same random order was used across all four
lists. The latter constraint ensured that fillers as well as
the experimental preambles from individual sets occurred in the same positions across the four lists for each
task. A different random order, but subject to the same
constraints, was used in the lists for the pronoun-completion task (note that in all subsequent experiments,
care was taken to use the same order of items in the
verb- and pronoun-elicitation lists).
Procedure
Participants were tested individually on either the
verb- or pronoun-elicitation task. For verb elicitation,
the instructions were to listen to each phrase on the tape
and then use it as the beginning of a sentence. The
participants were told to repeat each phrase and to
continue directly on with a completion that created a
single sentence, speaking as rapidly as possible. The
experimenter demonstrated the procedure with two examples. No other instructions about the form of the
responses were given.
In the pronoun-elicitation task, participants were
informed that they would hear sentences to which they
were to add a tag question. Tag questions were illustrated with four examples (all different from the list
items, with no number conflicts) and without any explicit instructions about the form that tag questions
take. The participants were asked to repeat each pre-
257
amble and to continue directly on with a tag question,
speaking as rapidly as possible. They received four
practice items (which resembled the filler and experimental sentences). For any of the practice items, failures to produce tags containing didn’t followed by a
pronoun were remodeled by example. This feedback
occurred only for the examples during the instruction
period, and the remodeling did not change pronouns in
otherwise well-formed tags (e.g., did they would be
remodeled as didn’t they, whether or not the number
was aberrant).
In all sessions the experimenter played the preambles
from the pre-recorded lists one at a time, pausing the
tape after each one. The pause cued the participant to
repeat and complete the preamble. If the participant had
trouble hearing the preamble, the experimenter repeated
it. Participants were encouraged to add their completions more quickly and to speak more rapidly if either
rate slowed appreciably in the course of the experiment.
The sessions took approximately 15 min and were recorded on audio tape.
Scoring
The responses to the preambles in both tasks were
transcribed and then scored. For the verb-elicitation
task, there were four scoring categories. Singular responses contained one complete, correct repetition of
the sentence preamble that was followed, without interruption by other linguistic material, by a verb overtly
marked for singular number, and the completion formed
a sentence. Plural responses were the same as singulars
except for having a plural verb. Ambiguous responses
contained verbs not overtly marked for number (e.g.,
modals such as should, could, would, etc. or the past
tenses of regular verbs) but otherwise met the criteria for
Singular or Plural. All remaining responses were assigned to the Miscellaneous category. Most of these responses contained errors in repeating the preambles or
more than one repetition of the preamble before a
completion was produced.
In the pronoun-elicitation task, responses were assigned to one of three categories. Singular and Plural
responses contained one complete repetition of the
preamble immediately followed by the verb form didn’t
and a singular or plural pronoun whose animacy features were the same as those of the head noun of the
preamble. All other responses, including those that
contained a verb form other than didn’t or a pronoun
whose animacy features did not agree with the head
noun were assigned to the Miscellaneous category.
Applied to the responses, these scoring criteria yielded the distributions shown in Table 2. Overall, 60.8%
of the verbs and 78.2% of the pronouns fell into either
the Singular or Plural category. The difference in these
percentages was due primarily to the Ambiguous category, which constituted 25.2% of the verb responses.
258
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Table 2
Distribution of responses over categories in Experiment 1
Head/Local noun
number
Response category
Singular
Plural
Ambiguous
Miscellaneous
Verbs
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
Plural/Plural
Plural/Singular
316
236
9
6
7
43
329
299
167
121
107
121
22
112
67
86
Pronouns
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
Plural/Plural
Plural/Singular
457
272
30
48
9
61
362
364
—
46
179
120
100
—
—
—
Note. The Ambiguous response category did not apply to
pronouns.
Design and analyses
Each of the 128 participants received eight items in
each of the four cells of the design matrix formed by
crossing the factors of head number (singular or plural)
and local noun number (singular or plural). There was
one between-subjects factor, agreement target (verb or
pronoun). Every item was presented to 16 participants in
each of the eight cells formed by crossing the three
factors of head-noun number, local-noun number, and
agreement target.
The proportions of plurals (out of all Singular and
Plural responses) were calculated for each participant
and item in every condition. The proportions were
submitted to analyses of variance that were performed
with participants as a random factor and with items as a
random factor, and min F 0 was estimated following the
procedures advised by Clark (1973). Table 3 gives the F
and min F 0 statistics and the degrees of freedom associated with each source in the analyses. Because two
participants failed to produce any Singular or Plural
responses in a total of three cells, the degrees of freedom
were adjusted to compensate for missing values.
Effects were considered significant when they were
reliable at or beyond the .05 level. Planned pairwise
comparisons were used to evaluate predicted differences
between conditions, based on calculations of the 95%
confidence intervals using the mean-square error of the
relevant interactions from the participants and items
analyses separately.
Results
Fig. 2 shows a summary of the major results for the
conditions in which the head and local noun mismatched
in number. The measure shown is the overall proportion
of plural agreement targets produced out of all Singulars
and Plurals in each condition, with the overall propor-
tions of plural targets from the relevant control conditions subtracted. The control for the singular/plural
condition was the singular/singular condition, and the
control for the plural/singular condition was the plural/
plural condition.
As the figure indicates, for both pronouns and verbs
there was a strong inclination toward plural agreement
after singular subjects with plural local nouns. In the
analyses of variance this was reflected in the interaction
between head- and local-noun number (see Table 3). In
planned contrasts the difference between the singular
head/plural local noun condition and its control was
significant both for verbs and for pronouns (where the
respective differences of .13 and .16 both exceeded the
values of the 95% confidence intervals, which were .05
for participants and .07 for items). The difference between the plural head/singular local noun condition and
its control was not significant for verbs (.01) and was
marginal for pronouns ().04).
There were significant effects for head-noun number
(plural heads yielded more plural agreement targets than
singular heads), for local-noun number (plural local
nouns yielded more plural agreement targets than singular local nouns), and for the interaction between headnoun number and number target (verb or pronoun).
This interaction was due to a difference between pronouns and verbs in the proportions of plurals that were
produced with plural head nouns. Whereas singular
heads elicited comparable proportions of plural verbs
and plural pronouns (.08 and .09, respectively), with
plural heads there were more plural verbs than plural
pronouns (.98 and .90, respectively). Put differently, with
grammatically plural sentence subjects, speakers were
proportionally more likely to produce singular pronouns
than singular verbs, regardless of the local noun.
Most of the miscellaneous responses (68% of the 732)
involved changes in the number of the head or local
noun (a switch from singular to plural or vice versa) in
the preambles. The majority of the others resulted from
altered wording or multiple repetitions of the preambles
prior to completing them. To assess whether there were
systematic effects of these kinds of response problems on
agreement, we examined the distribution of singular and
plural agreement targets with respect to the grammatical
number of the heads and local nouns that were actually
produced. So, if a speaker reproduced the plural–singular preamble The keys to the cabinet as the singular–
singular The key to the cabinet and completed it with a
singular verb, in the re-scoring this would be treated as a
Miscellaneous Singular response to the singular–singular
preamble that was produced. Table 4 gives the breakdown of these Miscellaneous Singular and Miscellaneous Plural responses, along with the adjusted
proportions of plurals. The adjusted proportions include
both the Table 2 responses (those with correctly repeated preambles) and the miscellaneous responses.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
259
Table 3
Analysis of variance results for all experiments
Source of variance
By participants
Degrees of
freedom
F1
value
min F 0
By items
Degrees of
freedom
F2
value
Degrees of
freedom
F
value
Experiment 1
Agreement target
Head noun number
Local noun number
Agreement target Head noun number
Agreement target Local noun number
Head noun number Local noun number
Agreement target Head noun number Local
noun number
1,124
1,124
1,124
1,124
1,124
1,124
1,124
7.4
3851.0
42.6
12.1
.3y
65.3
3.6y
1,31
1,31
1,31
1,31
1,31
1,31
1,31
1.2y
2182.0
12.2
6.0
.4y
28.6
1.1y
Experiment 2: Collective local nouns
Agreement target
Local noun type
Local noun number
Agreement target Local noun type
Agreement target Local noun number
Local noun type Local noun number
Agreement target Local noun type Local
noun number
1,93
1,93
1,93
1,93
1,93
1,93
1,93
.5y
6.2
126.6
.6y
1.0y
5.2
.3y
1,14
1,14
1,14
1,14
1,14
1,14
1,14
.0y
2.9y
26.5
.9y
.0y
2.0y
.4y
1,14
1,29
1,20
1,65
1,14
1,26
1,60
.0y
2.0y
21.9
.4y
.0y
1.4y
.2y
Experiment 3: Collective head nouns
Agreement target
Head noun type
Local noun number
Agreement target Head noun type
Agreement target Local noun number
Head noun type Local noun number
Agreement target Head noun type Local
noun number
1,74
1,74
1,74
1,74
1,74
1,74
1,74
11.9
60.2
54.7
13.1
.8y
1.1y
1.6y
1,15
1,15
1,15
1,15
1,15
1,15
1,15
30.2
39.0
34.1
11.6
3.0y
.3y
5.7
1,81
1,38
1,37
1,46
1,88
1,25
1,87
8.6
23.7
21.0
6.2
.7y
.3y
1.3y
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
1,96
1,14
1,24
1.2
.02y
16.4
Experiments 2 and 3: Analysis of items with different positions of critical (collective and individual) nouns
Agreement target
—
—
1,14
20.5
Critical noun type
—
—
1,14
29.8
Local noun number
—
—
1,14
68.9
Position of critical noun
—
—
1,14
9.4
Agreement target Critical noun type
—
—
1,14
10.6
Agreement target Local noun number
—
—
1,14
2.9y
Agreement target Critical noun position
—
—
1,14
12.8
Critical noun type Local noun number
—
—
1,14
1.1y
Critical noun type Position of critical noun
—
—
1,14
21.0
Local noun number Position of critical noun
—
—
1,14
.5y
Agreement target Critical noun type Local
—
—
1,14
1.2y
noun number
Agreement target Critical noun type Position
—
—
1,14
8.0
of critical noun
Agreement target Local noun number Position —
—
1,14
1.6y
of critical noun
Critical noun type Local noun number Position —
—
1,14
.5y
of critical noun
Agreement target Critical noun type Local
—
—
1,14
7.2
noun number Position of critical noun
Experiment 4: Unitary and distributive subject noun phrases
Agreement target
1,83
Distributivity
1,83
Local noun number
1,83
1.4y
1.7y
66.6
1,14
1,14
1,14
11.3
.02y
21.8
1,42
1,70
1,50
1,65
1,110
1,63
1,52
1.0y
1393.0
9.5
4.0
.2y
19.6
.9y
260
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Table 3 (continued)
Source of variance
By participants
Degrees of
freedom
Agreement target Distributivity
Agreement target Local noun number
Distributivity Local noun number
Agreement target Distributivity Local noun
number
Experiment 5: Intrinsic plural local nouns
Agreement target
Local noun type
Agreement target Local noun type
F1
value
min F 0
By items
Degrees of
freedom
F2
value
Degrees of
freedom
F
value
1,83
1,83
1,83
1,83
9.0
.8y
2.5y
7.6
1,14
1,14
1,14
1,14
2.1y
12.3
.04y
1.7y
1,21
1,92
1,14
1,21
1.7y
.8y
14.4
1.4y
1,135
2,270
2,270
.2y
52.9
.3y
1,16
2,32
2,32
2.8y
10.4
.1y
1,149
2,46
2,56
.2y
8.7
.1y
Note. The degrees of freedom shown reflect adjustments for missing data.
Not significant (p > :05).
Table 4
Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous
responses in Experiment 1
Head/local noun
number produced
Fig. 2. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced after
heads and local nouns with mismatching number (relative to
proportions of plural targets in matching-number conditions) in
Experiment 1.
Generally, the miscellaneous responses contained
more agreement errors than the primary Singular and
Plural responses did. However, the differences between
the conditions in which the head and local noun
mismatched in number and those in which they matched were similar to the differences found among the
primary responses. Specifically, when the head noun
was singular and the local noun plural, more pronouns and verbs were produced as plurals than when
Response category
Miscellaneous
singular
Miscellaneous
plural
Adjusted
plural
proportion
Verbs
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
Plural/Plural
Plural/Singular
35
15
7
5
8
10
67
24
.04
.17
.96
.97
Pronouns
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
Plural/Plural
Plural/Singular
86
45
27
17
8
13
120
126
.03
.19
.89
.88
Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents the combined totals of the miscellaneous responses with the Singulars
and Plurals from Table 2. The tabulated miscellaneous responses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table 2
because the head and local noun numbers that were produced
in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head and
local noun numbers presented.
the head and local noun were both singular. When the
head noun was plural, it mattered very little whether
the head and local noun matched or mismatched in
number. In fact, of the 889 number targets produced
after plural heads with singular local nouns (combining the Singular, Plural, Miscellaneous Singular, and
Miscellaneous Plural responses), 91% were plural;
when the local noun was also plural, 92% of the 951
number targets were plural. Calculated separately for
verbs and pronouns, the corresponding percentages
were 96 and 97% for verbs and 89 and 88% for
pronouns.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Discussion
Consistent with the attraction prediction from marking and morphing, the attraction patterns for pronouns
were roughly the same as those for verbs. When the head
noun was singular and the local noun plural, there was a
general tendency for both types of agreement targets to
take on the number of the local noun. When the head
noun was plural and the local noun singular, neither verbs
nor pronouns were significantly affected by the local
nounÕs number. These results replicate the singular/plural
asymmetry found by Bock and Miller (1991) for verb
agreement, and extend it to pronoun agreement. Because
the explanation of the singular/plural asymmetry involves
differences in the effects of number specifications on head
and local nouns, the presence of the asymmetry for pronouns implies that pronoun number is influenced by the
grammatical number properties of the pronounÕs antecedents.
Pronouns displayed different agreement patterns than
verbs did when head nouns were plural. One interpretation of this difference is that pronouns were less likely
to agree with the grammatical number of the head noun
than verbs were. Alternatively, in light of the marginally
significant enhancement of this effect after singular local
nouns, it could be that pronouns were more likely to
undergo singular attraction than verbs, under the influence of the notional number of a singular local noun.
Experiment 2 began the systematic examination of the
comparative sensitivity of pronouns and verbs to the
local nounÕs notional number.
Experiment 2
The results of the first experiment suggested that
pronouns and verbs are about equally vulnerable to
attraction from plurals in a local noun phrase. However, there is an important constraint on attraction for
verbs that may be less likely to hold for pronouns:
Verbs seem relatively impervious to variations in notional number in the local noun. Bock et al. (2001)
found that the grammatical number of local nouns
attracted verbs, but not the notional number. Invariant
plural nouns like scissors created plural attraction, despite having a notionally singular reading, while collective nouns like army did not create plural attraction,
despite having a notionally plural reading. Thus, what
created attraction was the presence of a grammatical
plural.
Pronouns, however, are more likely to reflect notional number properties than verbs, and this may
happen in attraction as well. Such a result would argue
against marking-and-morphing, and in favor of proposals in which notional information is continuously
accessible to agreement or in which agreement features
261
are determined by correlated constraints. So, in Experiment 2, we assessed the effect on pronouns, relative to
verbs, of variations in the notional number of local
nouns. If the grammatical number specifications of local
nouns are the major force behind attraction, and not
their notional or conceptual number properties, pronouns should be no more likely than verbs to be attracted to notionally plural local nouns. Using
collectives and semantically related individual nouns as
local nouns, we elicited sentence completions containing
either pronouns or verbs. To compare the influence of
notional with grammatical number variations, we also
manipulated the grammatical number of the collective
and individual local nouns. Because of the weakness of
the effects of singular number in the previous experiment
and in other research, we omitted the plural head/singular local condition in this and the remaining experiments, to gain power for the singular head/plural local
contrast.
The participants, materials, list construction, experimental designs, and analyses of Experiments 2–5 were
the same in several respects that we summarize here to
avoid repetition in the methods sections of all the experiments. The participants were always native English
speakers, and none took part in more than one experiment. The experimental preambles were made up of
subject noun phrases with singular heads and adjoined
prepositional phrases containing a local noun; except as
noted, the local noun occurred in both singular and
plural forms. Half of the preambles were designed to
elicit verbs and half to elicit tag pronouns. The pronouneliciting versions always ended with the past-tense form
of an intransitive verb.
Filler preambles were made up of simple and complex noun phrases; the simple phrases included a determiner and noun or a determiner, adjective, and noun;
the complex phrases consisted of plural head nouns with
a local noun (equally often singular or plural) in a
prepositional phrase. Like the experimental preambles,
the fillers came in matched versions designed to elicit
verb or pronoun completions. Unlike the experimental
preambles, some of the fillers that were used to elicit
pronoun completions had transitive verbs with object
noun phrases, half singular objects and half plural objects, and the verbs varied in form (being past tense, past
progressive, or present progressive). The verbs of the
fillers also varied in whether they were positive (e.g.,
were solving, is eating) or negative (e.g., weren’t crossing,
didn’t laugh). The variations in the fillers were designed
to increase the diversity of the tag questions that
speakers produced.
There were separate sets of experimental lists for
eliciting verbs and pronouns, but the construction of
both sets of lists was otherwise identical: fillers occurred
in the same positions across lists, preambles representing
the same experimental items occurred in the same po-
262
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
sitions across lists, and each list contained exactly one
version of each experiment item. The lists began with
a minimum of eight fillers, with the remaining filler
and experimental preambles arranged randomly, subject to the constraint that at least two fillers separated
the experimental trials. The experimental preambles
were counterbalanced to ensure that every list contained equal numbers of items from each condition.
For each experiment, the full item set is given in the
appendix.
The filler and experimental preambles were digitally
recorded by native speakers of American English and
then edited and recorded onto audio tape for presentation. Different male and female speakers recorded the
materials for each experiment, but within each experiment all recordings were made by the same speaker.
The experimental designs followed from the structure
of the lists, and always included the between-participant
and within-item factor of verb or pronoun elicitation.
Scoring of the participantsÕ responses followed the criteria described in Experiment 1. Analyses of variance
were carried out on the proportions of plural targets in
each cell of the experimental designs for every participant and item, as in Experiment 1. The dependent variable (the proportion of plural targets) was calculated
from the number of Plural responses divided by the total
number of Plural and Singular responses. When data
were missing from cells of the experimental design, the
degrees of freedom in the analyses (shown in Table 3)
were adjusted accordingly.
Method
Participants
There were 96 volunteers from the same source as
Experiment 1.
16 item sets of 8 preambles each, illustrated in Table 5.
The local noun in the preambles was either a collective
(e.g., army) or a semantically related individual noun
(e.g., soldier). The individual nouns were selected to
represent likely members of the group denoted by the
corresponding collective noun, with one exception. The
exception was the individual noun for the collective jury,
which was judge.
There were 40 filler preambles. Four 56-item lists
were constructed from the experimental and filler materials.
Procedure
The procedure was the same as in the previous experiment.
Design and analysis
Each participant received four items in every cell of
the design formed by crossing the two factors of local
noun type (collective/individual) and local noun morphology (singular/plural). Every item was presented to
12 participants in each cell of the design formed by
crossing the factors of local noun type, local noun
morphology, and agreement target. Data were missing
for one participant and one item in one cell of the
design.
Scoring
Scoring yielded the distribution of responses shown
in Table 6. The overall percentages of responses scored
as Singular or Plural were 68.8 and 87.9% in the verband pronoun-eliciting conditions, respectively. The
difference in these percentages was due mostly to the
existence of ambiguous responses for verbs, which occurred on 18.2% of the verb trials.
Results
Materials
The verb conditions from this experiment were reported as Experiment 4 in Bock and Eberhard (1993),
and so the verb materials were as described in that study.
With the addition of the pronoun materials, there were
Fig. 3 gives the overall proportions of plural agreement targets after subtracting the proportions of plurals
that occurred after singular local nouns. The figure
shows that plural local nouns increased the use of plural
Table 5
Sample preamble set for Experiment 2
Type and number
of local noun
Agreement target
Verb
Tag pronoun
Individual
Singular
Plural
The record of the player
The record of the players
The record of the player improved
The record of the players improved
Collective
Singular
Plural
The record of the team
The record of the teams
The record of the team improved
The record of the teams improved
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Table 6
Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experiment 2
Type and
number of
local noun
Response category
Singular
Plural Ambiguous
Miscellaneous
Verbs
Individual
Singular
Plural
138
96
0
28
35
43
19
25
Collective
Singular
Plural
145
86
0
36
25
37
22
33
Pronouns
Individual
Singular
Plural
180
143
0
30
—
12
19
Collective
Singular
Plural
178
99
2
43
—
—
—
12
50
Note. The Ambiguous response category did not apply to
pronouns.
263
both significant (see Table 3). The enhanced attraction
associated with collective plurals compared to individual
plurals produced a significant interaction between local
noun number and local noun type in the analysis by
participants but not by items. More important, it did not
vary between pronouns and verbs. None of the effects
involving target type approached significance (all
F s 6 1).
The distributions of singular and plural targets
among the miscellaneous responses are shown in Table
7. They are tabulated as in Experiment 1, in terms of the
characteristics of the preambles that were actually produced. Included among the responses are those with
errors in preamble repetitions and those with tag questions using forms other than didn’t.
Discussion
As in the first experiment, the number values of
pronouns and verbs were influenced by the presence of a
plural local noun. The magnitude of this effect was
about the same in both cases, with .26 of the numbermarked verbs that were produced after plural local
nouns being plural, compared to .23 of the pronouns.
Singular collectives, which are notionally plural but
grammatically singular, were barely more likely than
Table 7
Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous
responses in Experiment 2
Local noun
number
produced
Fig. 3. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced after
collective and individual plural local nouns (relative to proportions of plural targets after collective and individual singular
local nouns) in Experiment 2.
pronouns and verbs, and did so after both individual
and collective nouns. In the analyses of variance, the
effect of local noun number and local noun type were
Response category
Miscellaneous
singular
Miscellaneous
plural
Adjusted
plural
proportion
Verbs
Individual
Singular
Plural
19
15
0
2
.00
.21
Collective
Singular
Plural
27
7
0
5
.00
.31
Pronouns
Individual
Singular
Plural
12
11
0
2
.00
.17
Collective
Singular
Plural
21
10
3
2
.02
.29
Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents the combined totals of the miscellaneous responses with the Singulars
and Plurals from Table 6. The tabulated miscellaneous responses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table 6
because the head and local noun numbers that were produced
in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head and
local noun numbers presented.
264
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
singular individual nouns to create attraction, for either
verbs or pronouns. For verbs, there were no plural responses at all; for pronouns, there were two, .01 of all
responses after singular collectives. Though it would be
premature to conclude that notional number in local
noun position never influences pronoun number, it does
appear to be a rare event.
Grammatically plural collective local nouns created
more attraction than individual grammatical plurals (.30
to .20), but this occurred for verbs as well as for pronouns. That is, whatever increased the levels of plural
agreement after collective plural local nouns affected
pronouns and verbs to similar degrees. A likely source of
this disparity is the frequency of plural relative to singular collectives, as contrasted with the frequencies of
the individual plurals and singulars (cf. Barker & Nicol,
2000; Spalek & Schriefers, 2004). For the collectives, the
mean frequencies of the plural and singular forms were
353 and 1142, respectively; for individual nouns, the
mean frequencies for plurals and singulars were 1065
and 687, respectively, in the CELEX Lexical Database
(Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). In the discussion of Experiment 5 we return to the possible effects
of these frequency contrasts. But first, in Experiment 3,
we explored how the local nouns from Experiment 2
affected verb and pronoun number when they served as
head nouns.
Experiment 3
The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggested that
pronouns and verbs are similar in how they respond to
the presence of grammatically plural attractors in the
local noun phrase, and in how they do not respond to
the presence of notionally plural attractors. The simplest
interpretation of these findings might be that the
mechanisms of number agreement for pronouns and
verbs are the same: The number of an agreement target
is determined in the same way regardless of whether it is
a verb or a pronoun.
The marking and morphing prediction is different. If
pronouns are more vulnerable to the notional number of
their controllers than verbs are, after grammatically
singular but notionally plural collective controllers
pronouns should be more likely than verbs to be plural.
Previous experiments have found support for this prediction (Bock et al., 1999, 2004), but did not examine the
effects of the same words used as head and local nouns.
It could be that differences in the notional effects that
have been observed in head and local positions are due
to differences in the nouns used as controllers and
attractors. To test the marking and morphing predictions more strictly, Experiment 3 was carried out using
the collective nouns from Experiment 2 as heads. This
allowed us to determine whether the differences in verb
and pronoun agreement found by Bock et al. (1999) can
be replicated with a sample of collectives whose behavior
in local-noun position was the same for pronouns and
verbs.
Method
Participants
Ninety-six University of Illinois undergraduates
participated in order to fulfill a requirement in an introductory psychology course.
Materials
The collective and individual nouns were the same
ones used in Experiment 2, and the experimental items
were analogous in construction except that the collective
and individual nouns served as heads rather than local
nouns. Table 8 shows a sample item. Half of the versions
of each item had an individual head noun and half had
the semantically related collective head noun.
There were 48 fillers, 32 plural and 16 singular, to
equate the total number of singular and plural items in
the lists. Eight 64-item lists were created from these
materials, with four preambles in each list representing
each of the four combinations of head type and local
noun number.
Procedure
The experiment followed the procedures from Experiments 1 and 2.
Design and scoring
The three experimental factors were head-noun type
(collective or individual), local-noun number (singular
Table 8
Sample preamble set for Experiment 3
Type of head
noun
Number of
local noun
Agreement target
Verb
Tag pronoun
Individual
Singular
Plural
The player with the commercial contract
The player with the commercial contracts
The player with the commercial contract won
The player with the commercial contracts won
Collective
Singular
Plural
The team with the commercial contract
The team with the commercial contracts
The team with the commercial contract won
The team with the commercial contracts won
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
or plural), and number target (verb or pronoun).
Orthogonal combinations of these three factors yielded
eight conditions. Participants received four items representing each of the four combinations of head-noun
type and local-noun number. Each item was presented
to 12 participants in each condition.
Scoring for verbs yielded 321 singulars (41.8%), 69
plurals (9.0%), 276 ambiguous responses (35.9%), and
102 miscellaneous responses (13.3%). For the pronouns, there were 353 singulars (46.0%), 170 plurals
(22.1%), and 245 miscellaneous responses (31.9%).
Table 9 shows how the responses were distributed over
conditions.
265
were .13 for participants and .11 for items, making the
effect of target type significant after collective but not
after individual head nouns.
Local noun number also influenced the production of
plural targets, with significantly more plural targets after
plural local nouns. These effects were similar in size for
Results
Overall, the type of head noun (collective or individual) had a substantial effect on the proportion of
plural targets (.41 plurals after collective and .11 after
individual head nouns; see Table 3 for the statistical
summary). When the number target is taken into account, it is evident that much of this was due to pronouns: There was a larger effect of the type of head noun
on pronouns (.50 plurals after collective compared to .13
after individual head nouns) than on verbs (.27 plurals
after collectives compared to .09 after individual head
nouns).
Fig. 4 shows that these differences remained even in
the absence of plural local nouns. With no grammatically plural nouns in the subject noun phrase, .44 of the
pronouns were plural compared to .12 of the verbs when
the head nouns were collectives; the corresponding
proportions when the head nouns were individuals were
.05 and .02. These effects are captured in the interaction
between head-noun type and agreement target. The 95%
confidence intervals for pairwise planned comparisons
Fig. 4. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced in
Experiment 3 after collective and individual singular head
nouns (with singular local nouns).
Table 9
Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experiment 3
Head noun
type
Verbs
Individual
Collective
Pronouns
Individual
Collective
Local noun
number
Response category
Singular
Plural
Ambiguous
Miscellaneous
Singular
Plural
111
73
2
16
64
66
15
37
Singular
Plural
82
55
11
40
79
67
20
30
Singular
Plural
140
75
7
26
—
45
91
Singular
Plural
88
50
68
69
—
Note. The Ambiguous response category did not apply to pronouns.
—
—
36
73
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K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
pronouns and verbs, with overall increases of .24 and
.18, respectively.
For miscellaneous responses, the distribution of singular and plural targets is given in Table 10, classified
relative to the preamble forms actually produced. As in
the previous experiments, these results were combined
with those from the correctly reproduced preambles
to yield the adjusted plural proportions shown. The
adjusted proportions are comparable to those calculated from the primary Singular and Plural response
categories.
plural), critical noun type (individual or collective), and
position of critical noun (head or local). The results
(shown in Table 3) are easily summarized: Everything
was significant (with F sð1; 14Þ > 7:9) other than all of
the two- and three-way interactions involving local noun
Discussion
In contrast to the small effects of collective local
nouns on verb as well as pronoun number observed in
Experiment 2, the same collectives in head-noun position produced a large difference between the two
agreement targets in Experiment 3. Fig. 5 combines the
results to show how differences in the locations of the
collective nouns affected the behavior of pronouns and
verbs in Experiments 2 and 3. With grammatically singular collectives in local-noun position (shown in the top
panel of the figure), there was essentially no difference
between pronouns and verbs. With the collectives as
head nouns (shown in the bottom panel of the figure),
pronouns were much more likely to be plural than verbs
regardless of the number of the local noun.
To evaluate the overall patterns statistically, we
carried out a joint analysis of variance on the items from
Experiments 2 and 3, treating as variants of the same
item the preambles that shared collective nouns. In the
analysis, the within-items factors were number target
(verb or pronoun), local noun number (singular or
Fig. 5. Overall proportions of plural pronouns and verbs produced with collective local nouns (upper panel) in Experiment 2
and the same collectives as head nouns (lower panel) in Experiment 3.
Table 10
Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous responses in Experiment 3
Head noun type
produced
Verbs
Individual
Collective
Pronouns
Individual
Collective
Local noun number
produced
Response category
Miscellaneous singular
Miscellaneous plural
Adjusted plural
proportion
Singular
Plural
10
3
0
2
.02
.19
Singular
Plural
10
3
4
4
.14
.43
Singular
Plural
41
13
9
3
.08
.25
Singular
Plural
15
7
25
25
.47
.62
Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents plural responses within the combined total of the miscellaneous responses and the
Singulars and Plurals from Table 9. The tabulated miscellaneous responses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table 9
because the local noun numbers that were produced in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head and local noun numbers
presented.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
number (all F sð1; 14Þ < 2:9). Spelled out, the magnitude
of attraction varied little or not at all with changes in the
position of the critical noun, with changes in the number
target, or with the change from individual to collective
critical nouns. The size of the attraction effect was
likewise stable within the pairwise combinations of these
factors. So, there was roughly equivalent attraction regardless of whether the critical noun was the head or
local noun and the number target was a verb or a pronoun, whether the critical noun was the head or local or
individual or collective, and whether the critical noun
was individual or collective and the agreement target
was a verb or a pronoun.
What did matter was the position of collective nouns,
in three different respects. First, when collectives were
heads there was significantly more plural agreement
than when they were local nouns. Second, when the
collectives were heads, but not when they were local
nouns, there were significantly more plural pronouns
than plural verbs. Finally, with collective but not individual heads, there was an unusually large, significant
difference between singular and plural local nouns for
verb targets compared to pronoun targets (a difference
of .30 against .14). This last result is reflected in the
significant four-way interaction, which was the only interaction in which local noun number figured.
There is a fairly straightforward interpretation of this
superficially complicated pattern in terms of markingand-morphing mechanisms. With collective heads and
plural local nouns, the subject as a whole has a potential
distributive construal. That is, a phrase such as the audience at the tennis matches can be interpreted as referring to an audience type, different tokens of which
attended different matches, creating a notional plural.
This construal should induce plural marking of the verb
phrase, creating the distributive enhancement observed by
Bock et al. (1999). For pronouns, the notional number of
the antecedent (the collective head) is what matters to a
pronounÕs initial number value. With distributive enhancement, when the notional number is plural, the
pronoun will be plural. A plural local noun can do little
more to influence the pronounÕs number, apart from the
normal morphing operations that create attraction.
Experiment 4
Experiment 3 provided further support for the assumption that pronouns differ from verbs in their normal agreement properties even with superficially
identical number controllers. Specifically, pronouns
were more likely than verbs to reflect the notional plurality of collective head nouns. Verbs tended to be singular, in apparent agreement with the grammatical
singularity of most collectives in American English.
Most clearly after collective heads with singular local
267
nouns, and with no grammatical plurals at all in the
subject noun phrase, the incidence of plural pronouns
was almost four times greater than the incidence of
plural verbs. This replicates Bock et al. (1999) and, in
company with Experiment 2, goes beyond it to show
that matched collectives, as local nouns, had no differential impact on verb and pronoun number.
If pronouns are genuinely more sensitive to the notional number properties of their controllers than verbs
are, they should also tend to be plural whenever their
antecedents have distributive construals. In one respect,
the results of Experiment 1 challenge this prediction.
Among the preambles in Experiment 1 there was a small
subset with a predominantly distributive interpretation
and another subset with a predominantly unitary interpretation. Each of these subsets constituted 25% of the
experimental items within the condition with singular
heads and plural local nouns. Despite this, there was
relatively little difference between pronouns and verbs in
plural agreement.
We inspected the results for the unitary and distributive items in Experiment 1 separately, to see whether
they revealed any differential trends in plurality for
pronouns and verbs. Relative to their respective controls
with singular heads and local nouns, .35 of the pronouns
in the distributive preamble completions were plural
compared to .23 of the pronouns in the unitary completions. The respective proportions for verbs were .06
and .26. There was therefore an effect of distributivity
for pronouns (a difference of .12) but not for verbs (a
difference in the wrong direction of .20), consistent with
the results of Experiment 3. To see if these trends could
be confirmed with a more stringent test, Experiment 4
compared the unitary and distributive items alone.
Method
Participants
Ninety-six Michigan State University undergraduates
participated in the experiment in exchange for extra
credit in introductory psychology courses.
Materials
The experimental materials were a subset of the
preambles employed in Experiment 1 (items 1–16 in the
appendix). In the versions with singular heads and plural
local nouns, half of the items encouraged a distributive,
notionally plural interpretation, and half encouraged a
unitary, notionally singular interpretation. The notional-number properties were validated in ratings collected
by Bock and Miller (1991). Raters judged the notional
plurals as referring to multiple objects 79% of the time,
compared to l8% for the notional singulars. Table 11
lists a complete set of preambles of each type in the verbeliciting and pronoun-eliciting versions. There were two
changes to the items from Experiment 1. Only the
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K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Table 11
Sample preamble set for Experiment 4
Number ofhead
noun
Number of
local noun
Number target
Verb
Tag pronoun
Notionally singular preamble
Singular
Singular
Singular
Plural
The letter from the lawyer
The letter from the lawyers
The letter from the lawyer vanished
The letter from the lawyers vanished
Notionally plural preamble
Singular
Singular
Singular
Plural
The picture on the postcard
The picture on the postcards
The picture on the postcard faded
The picture on the postcards faded
versions of the preambles with singular heads were used,
with the local nouns varying between the singular and
plural forms. The second change was in the verb used for
the pronoun-eliciting version of one of the items: Because the initial /s/ of ceased could be misheard as a
plural on the preceding local noun, we replaced it with
the verb ended. The 40 fillers were the same ones used in
Experiment 2.
Two lists were created for each experimental task.
The procedure for constructing the lists was the same as
in Experiment 1, except that the orders in the verb and
pronoun lists were identical.
Design and data analyses
In the design for participants, there were two withinparticipants factors of preamble type (unitary or distributive) and local noun number (singular or plural). Of
the 96 participants, half received four verb-eliciting
items and the other half received four pronoun-eliciting
items in every cell of the within-participants design.
Each of the 16 items was presented to 12 participants in
every cell of a within-items design formed by crossing
the factors of agreement target, preamble type, and local
noun number.
Scoring
Table 12 shows the breakdown of responses across
conditions. Overall, 69.1% of the verb responses and
69.9% of the pronoun responses were scored as Singular
or Plural.
Results
Fig. 6 summarizes the results for pronouns and verbs
in the unitary and distributive conditions after subtracting the proportions of plurals in the control conditions (where local nouns were singular). The principal
result was that plural pronouns were used more often
with distributive than with unitary subjects while plural
verbs did not differ significantly. In fact, the only significant increase in the use of plural targets occurred for
pronouns in the distributive condition. This is captured
in the three-way interaction among agreement target,
Table 12
Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experiment 4
Preamble type
and head/local
noun number
Response category
Singular
Plural
Ambiguous
Miscellaneous
Verbs
Unitary
Singular/Singular 137
Singular/Plural
99
2
38
44
32
9
23
Distributive
Singular/Singular 130
Singular/Plural
99
1
25
57
39
4
29
Pronouns
Unitary
Singular/Singular 164
Singular/Plural
77
1
30
—
27
85
Distributive
Singular/Singular 163
Singular/Plural
58
1
43
—
—
—
28
91
Note. The Ambiguous response category did not apply to
pronouns.
local-noun number, and distributivity (see Table 3). The
interaction was significant for participants but not items.
The 95% confidence interval for planned comparisons
calculated from the participant analysis was .04; for
items it was .25.
The weakness of the effects in the item analysis reflects the small number of items in each condition and
the between-item manipulation of distributivity. To
show the individual item results, Fig. 7 plots the net
plural proportions for each distributive and unitary item
(a between-item contrast) when they were used to elicit
pronouns and verbs (a within-item contrast). As the
figure indicates, for verbs there were no systematic differences associated with the construal of the preamble.
For pronouns, however, six of the eight distributive
items showed a strong tendency to elicit plural pronouns. Only two of the unitary items behaved similarly.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
269
Table 13
Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous
responses in Experiment 4
Preamble type and
head/local noun
number produced
Fig. 6. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced in
Experiment 4 after notionally singular and plural (unitary and
distributive) subject noun phrases, relative to proportions of
plural targets in corresponding control conditions.
Response category
Adjusted
plural
proportion
Miscellaneous
singular
Miscellaneous
plural
Verbs
Unitary
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
7
6
0
1
.01
.27
Distributive
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
6
3
0
1
.01
.20
Pronouns
Unitary
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
43
26
1
6
.01
.26
Distributive
Singular/Singular
Singular/Plural
37
19
2
7
.01
.39
Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents the combined totals of the miscellaneous responses with the Singulars
and Plurals from Table 12. The tabulated miscellaneous responses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table
12 because the head and local noun numbers that were produced in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head
and local noun numbers presented.
number different from the one presented, omitting those
for which the mistake yielded a plural head noun
(overall, there were 35 of the latter responses for unitary
preambles and 58 for distributive preambles). For pronouns, the table also includes the agreement results for
miscellaneous responses with tag verbs other than didn’t.
Discussion
Fig. 7. Relative proportions of plural pronouns and verbs
produced for individual items in the unitary and distributive
conditions in Experiment 4.
Consistent with these item patterns were the results of
correlations between the notional number ratings for the
items (taken from Bock & Miller, 1991) and the use of
plural number in the present experiment. For pronouns
the correlation was r ¼ :36; for verbs it was .17.
Table 13 gives the distribution of singular and plural
agreement targets for the miscellaneous responses in
which the head and local nouns were reproduced with a
In the same way that pronouns more than verbs
appeared to capture the distributive possibilities in collective head nouns in Experiment 3, pronouns in Experiment 4 tended to reflect the distributive properties of
antecedents with distributive readings. This occurred
even though the head nouns of these phrases, unlike the
collectives in Experiment 3, had no inherent notional
plurality. Unitary subject noun phrases such as the key
to the cabinets are likely to be interpreted as referring to
just one key, and key is an individual noun (in the terminology of Experiments 2 and 3). In contrast, distributive phrases refer to a type with multiple tokens.
Consequently, a phrase such as the picture on the postcards implies several instances of the same picture distributed over many postcards, though picture is likewise
270
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
an individual noun. Regardless, in Experiment 4 pronouns were more likely than verbs to be plural after
distributive than after unitary subjects.
The verb-eliciting preambles used in Experiment 4
were identical to the distributive and unitary preambles
used by Bock and Miller (1991), and yielded similar
results. Eberhard (1999) has shown that these same
preambles differ in concreteness, too, and that eliminating the concreteness difference leads to more plural
verb agreement with distributive than unitary subjects.
EberhardÕs finding adds an important qualification to
Bock and MillerÕs interpretation of the absence of an
effect of distributivity on verb agreement, but it does not
undermine the conclusion from the current study. That
conclusion hinges on the difference between pronouns
and verbs, rather than the absence of a difference for
verbs and the presence of one for pronouns. Had there
been a distributivity effect for verbs, as there was in
Experiment 3, we would expect the effect for pronouns
to be that much bigger, just as it was in Experiment 3.
Experiment 5
Experiment 5 was designed to exploit different kinds
of morphological features to compare the contributions
of meaning and morphology to pronoun and verb
number. There are at least two different varieties of
morphological features that control agreement (Corbett,
1998). So-called inherent features are invariant properties of words, and tend to be linked to features of
meaning in fairly arbitrary ways. In languages with
grammatical gender, gender is a familiar example of an
inherent morphological feature: Nouns in such languages belong to classes like masculine, feminine, or
neuter, and they do not freely move between classes. In
addition, the majority of the words in each class have
little to do with natural or biological gender. Gender is
sufficiently unpredictable that gender-marking languages have easy-to-find instances of semantic inconsistencies. Words from the same semantic categories can
belong to different genders (in Dutch, the words for fork
and spoon belong to one gender, while the word for knife
belongs to another); synonymous words may belong to
different classes (fiets means bicycle in Dutch, and belongs to a different gender category than rijwiel, which
also means bicycle in Dutch), and even words that refer
to things with a readily obvious natural gender may
belong to a mismatching grammatical gender class (the
basic-level term for girl in Dutch is grammatically neuter). We will refer to inherent morphological features as
intrinsic features.
In contrast, variable features can be taken on or shed
by words, and tend to have clear semantic underpinnings. Grammatical number is a familiar example: Most
nouns in English may be singular or plural as the oc-
casion demands, and the demands of the occasion are
fairly reliably rooted in a conceptual or notional difference: A lone cow is a cow, but a pair are cows. To
highlight the contrast with intrinsic morphological features, we refer to variable features as extrinsic.
Although gender features tend to be intrinsic and
number features extrinsic, there are subclasses of nouns
that carry gender extrinsically and number intrinsically.
In Italian, for example, many nouns with natural gender
participate in a regular alternation between masculine
and feminine forms (ragazzo–ragazza [boy–girl]; sposo–
sposa [husband–wife]; amico–amica [male friend–female
friend]), making gender extrinsic. In English, some noun
classes carry number intrinsically: Scissors are scissors,
whether one or more than one, as pliers are pliers, pants
pants, and so on. An important difference between
words with intrinsic number and those with extrinsic
number is that the latter participate in an inflectional
alternation between singulars and plurals, whereas intrinsic plurals do not inflect for number and have no
singular counterpart. This sets them apart from irregular
plurals such as mice and feet. Irregular plurals lack
regular plural inflection (by definition), but they have
singular counterparts to which they are related both
semantically and morphologically.
Intrinsic and extrinsic features can both control
agreement, but in previous work (Bock et al., 2001), we
found that they differed in the degree to which they
triggered attraction in verbs. Significantly less attraction
occurred with intrinsic plural local nouns (like scissors
and suds) than extrinsic plurals (like razors and bubbles).
Although attraction was evident for both types of plurals, it appeared that the plural inflection of a variable
noun was more likely to transmit a plural feature to an
agreeing verb than a fixed plural noun form. This is part
of morphingÕs contribution to attraction.
In contrast to the morphological effect, there was
little evidence for a contribution to verb number from
the semantic properties of local nouns. Ratings showed
that intrinsic plurals like scissors are notionally singular
relative to intrinsic plurals like suds, which were judged
to be notionally plural. Yet the amount of attraction
triggered by the notional plurals, relative to their controls, was no larger than the amount of attraction triggered by the notional singulars, relative to their controls.
In fact, it was somewhat smaller (see Bock et al., 2001,
Experiments 1 and 2). This is consistent with a negligible
contribution to verb attraction from the notional
properties of local nouns.
The morphological and semantic properties of intrinsic and extrinsic plurals provide our last test for the
extension of marking-and-morphing mechanisms to
pronouns. Morphing creates attraction. If pronoun attraction is mediated by the same processes that create
verb attraction, pronouns should exhibit the same
morphological sensitivity as verbs, being more attracted
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
271
to extrinsic than intrinsic plurals. Likewise, if attraction
for both pronouns and verbs occurs at a point during
production when the notional properties of agreement
controllers have little force, pronouns should be as invulnerable as verbs to the notional properties of attracting nouns. This would stand in contrast to the
demonstrated sensitivity of pronouns to the notional
properties of subjects as wholes. When the notional
variation occurs on local nouns, there should be little or
no corresponding variation in the amount of attraction
attributable to local notional properties. Because the
invariant, intrinsic plurals in Experiment 5 were notionally singular, the relevant notional number here,
in contrast to the local nouns in Experiment 2, was
singular.
‘‘one thing’’ or ‘‘more than one thing.’’ The ratings were
analyzed by converting a ‘‘one thing’’ rating to 1, and a
‘‘more than one’’ rating to 2, creating a scale ranging from
1 to 2. The means of these ratings are displayed in Table
14. As anticipated, only the ‘‘more than one’’ rating for
the distributive item set with extrinsic plural local nouns
was significantly (p < :05) or marginally different
(p < :10) from all of the other ratings, which did not differ
reliably (the 95% confidence interval was .148 and the 90%
confidence interval was .129).
The filler materials consisted of 78 preambles. The
head nouns of 30 fillers were singular and the remaining
48 were plural, to balance the singular heads of the experimental preambles. The fillers and experimental preambles were assembled into six lists.
Method
Design and analysis
Every participant received six items in each of the
three local-noun conditions (singular, extrinsic plural,
and intrinsic plural). Every item was presented to 23
participants in each of the six cells of the design formed
by crossing the local noun and agreement target conditions. Note that the distributions of unitary and distributive items were balanced by items, but not by
participants.
Participants
The participants were 138 undergraduates from the
University of Illinois. In return for their assistance they
received credit toward a requirement in an introductory
psychology course or payment.
Materials
There were 18 preamble sets, each containing six
versions, adapted from the verb materials in Bock et al.
(2001). Table 14 gives two examples. The preambles in
each set contained a singular head noun and three types
of local nouns, either singular (e.g., suit), extrinsic plural
(suits), or intrinsic plural (trousers).
The whole-subject notional properties of the preambles with singular heads and extrinsic plural local nouns
were balanced by composing half with unitary and half
with distributive readings. To validate these notional
properties, ratings were collected for all of the subject
noun phrases in the experimental items. The phrases to be
rated were divided over three lists so that every list contained only one of the three versions of each of the 18
different phrases employed. The ratings were performed
by 36 undergraduates (none of whom took part in the
main experiment), equally apportioned over the lists. The
instructions were to indicate whether a phrase referred to
Results
Table 15 shows the distribution of responses, including a breakdown for distributive and unitary items.
Fig. 8 depicts the main results in terms of the proportions of plural responses in each condition. For both
pronouns and verbs, more plurals occurred after extrinsic plural (.21) than after intrinsic plural (.15) local
nouns, and both of these conditions were associated
with more plural targets than were singular local nouns
(.01). All of these differences were significant, judged
against the 95% confidence intervals for participants and
items of .04 and .05, respectively. The magnitude of the
difference between extrinsic and intrinsic plurals was
comparable for verbs (.12) and pronouns (.14). None of
the main effects or interactions involving target type
were significant.
Table 14
Sample preamble set for Experiment 5 with notional number ratings for materials in each condition
Agreement target
Local noun
Unitary
Mean
notional
number
rating
Verb-eliciting preambles (and verb for pronoun-eliciting preambles)
Singular
The drawer for the needle (jammed)
1.22
Extrinsic plural
The drawer for the needles (jammed)
1.28
Intrinsic plural
The drawer for the tweezers (jammed)
1.28
Distributive
Mean
notional
number
rating
The style of the designerÕs suit (fizzled)
The style of the designerÕs suits (fizzled)
The style of the designerÕs trousers (fizzled)
1.22
1.42
1.26
272
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Table 15
Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experiment 5
Local-noun
condition
Scoring category
Singular
Plural
Ambiguous
Miscellaneous
Verbs
Singular
Unitary
Distributive
134
136
0
1
55
56
18
14
Extrinsic plural
Unitary
Distributive
109
87
13
41
63
47
22
32
Intrinsic plural
Unitary
Distributive
114
111
7
35
69
52
17
9
Pronouns
Singular
Unitary
Distributive
193
178
0
4
—
14
25
Extrinsic plural
Unitary
Distributive
156
104
11
54
—
Intrinsic plural
Unitary
Distributive
181
130
12
38
—
—
—
—
40
49
14
39
Note. Ambiguous responses occurred only for verbs.
(and necessarily) differed in rated notional number
from the others (see Table 14). These were the distributive versions of the preambles with extrinsic plural
local nouns. In line with the hypothesized sensitivity of
pronouns to notional plurality, examination of plural
proportions calculated from the data in Table 15 shows
that only after extrinsic plural local nouns did pronouns and verbs differ in the magnitude of the unitary/
distributive difference: The unitary/distributive difference for pronouns was larger than the same difference
for verbs (.27 to .21). Though the corresponding threeway interaction (among target, local noun type, and
distributivity) failed to achieve significance in analyses
of variance that included distributivity as a factor, the
pattern of effects is consistent with the differences in
distributive sensitivity between pronouns and verbs in
previous experiments.
Table 16 gives the results for the scoring of the
miscellaneous responses, following the procedures described for previous experiments. Combining the
agreement patterns in the miscellaneous responses with
those in the strictly scored Singular and Plural responses led to no changes in the overall findings. Note
that the tabulation is not broken down between unitary
and distributive items because the miscellaneous responses could alter the distributive properties of the
preambles presented.
Discussion
For both pronouns and verbs, extrinsic plurals yielded significantly more attraction than intrinsic plurals
Table 16
Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous
responses in Experiment 5
Local noun type
produced
Fig. 8. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced after
singular, extrinsic plural, and intrinsic plural local nouns in
Experiment 5.
Although the materials were designed to control
rather than to manipulate distributivity, in one cell of
the item design there were preambles that consistently
Response category
Adjusted
plural
proportion
Miscellaneous
singular
Miscellaneous
plural
Verbs
Singular
Extrinsic plural
Intrinsic plural
18
9
9
2
2
1
.01
.21
.16
Pronouns
Singular
Extrinsic plural
Intrinsic plural
24
35
21
3
13
6
.02
.21
.14
Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents the combined totals of the miscellaneous responses with the Singulars
and Plurals from Table 15. The tabulated miscellaneous responses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table
15 because the head and local noun numbers that were produced in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head
and local noun numbers presented.
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
did. The magnitude of this effect was very much the
same for both types of targets, suggesting that the attraction of pronouns to local grammatical plurals was
not modulated by the notionally singular meaning of the
intrinsic plurals. Had that been the case, pronouns
should have been less vulnerable than verbs to attraction
from intrinsic plurals, which lack notional plurality. As
testimony to the weakness in plural meaning, Bock et al.
(2001) gathered ratings of notional number for intrinsic
and extrinsic plural words (the same words used in the
present experiment) and found that singulars and intrinsic plurals were judged more similar to each other in
notional number than were intrinsic and extrinsic plurals. There was no significant difference between singulars and intrinsic plurals (with ratings of 1.17 and 1.20
on a scale between 1 and 2), and both differed significantly from the extrinsic plurals (which had a rating of
1.75).
Despite the substantial differences between intrinsic
and extrinsic plurals in their notional number construals, and despite the substantial differences between
pronouns and verbs in sensitivity to plural meanings
shown in previous experiments, the plural attraction
exhibited by pronouns and verbs in Experiment 5 was
the same. Pronouns were no more likely than verbs to be
singular after the notionally singular intrinsic local
nouns. Furthermore, pronouns and verbs both exhibited
the differences in attraction associated with the morphological properties of intrinsic and extrinsic plurals
(Bock et al., 2001), giving further support to a morphological account of attraction.
The only discernible difference in plural pronoun
agreement attributable to notional number properties
occurred for the subset of items that received ratings
consistent with a notionally plural construal. These
distributive items tended to elicit more plural pronouns than plural verbs, relative to unitary items in
the same condition (i.e., the extrinsic plural condition).
This is consistent with the results for verbs and pronouns in Experiment 4. In all cases, however, the attraction patterns for pronouns were the same as those
for verbs.
These trends argue for divergent avenues from notional plurality to plural agreement in pronouns and
verbs, but with similar implementation processes creating attraction for both kinds of agreement targets. In
Experiment 5, the magnitude of attraction from grammatically plural local nouns was the same for pronouns
and verbs and did not vary with changes in the controllerÕs notional number or the notional number of the
local noun. Moreover, pronouns were no less likely than
verbs to be attracted to intrinsic plural local nouns,
whose notional number was singular. Instead, pronouns
and verbs revealed the same differences in attraction to
the different grammatical properties of intrinsic and
extrinsic plurals.
273
Still open is the question of what creates the difference in attraction between intrinsic and extrinsic plurals.
One property is their relative semantic involvement:
Intrinsic plurals have little to no notional support
whereas extrinsic plurals do have such support. Arguing
against this account is the absence of any clear semantic
effect on attraction. There is no increase in number attraction when there is notional support for number;
similarly, there is no increase in gender attraction when
there is conceptual support for gender (Vigliocco &
Franck, 1999). If semantic involvement were the culprit
behind intrinsic and extrinsic differences, it would be a
mystery why semantic support matters here and nowhere else.
A different explanation rests on lexical contrastiveness. Extrinsic plurals (like extrinsic genders in languages such as Italian) have contrasting forms with
different morphological values; intrinsic plurals (like
intrinsic genders) do not. If the absence of contrast
translates into less attraction (as proposed in Bock et al.,
2001), weaker attraction from intrinsic number would
follow. Another relevant observation comes from an
adventitious result in Experiment 2. There, increased
attraction occurred for plurals that were low in frequency relative to their corresponding singulars. Perhaps something analogous to the amount of competition
that a plural experiences from its singular counterpart
contributes to the pluralÕs ability to attract number. On
this hypothesis, the weakness of attraction to intrinsic
plurals reflects the absence of competition; the strength
of attraction to plural collectives reflects the strength of
the competition from the singular that the plural must
overcome.
To assess whether variations in contrastiveness might
be linked to variations in attraction, we created a frequency-based contrastiveness measure for local nouns
and correlated it with a measure of verb attraction and
pronoun attraction for the items from Experiment 2.
The attraction measure was the difference in the proportions of plural verbs (or plural pronouns) used after
(a) singular heads with plural local nouns and (b) singular heads with singular local nouns. The contrast
measure represented the difference in frequencies between the singular and plural forms of a word (i.e., the
relative frequency) weighted in terms of the absolute
frequencies of the two forms combined (the lemma frequency). The weight represented the frequency of each
lemma as a proportion of the total frequency of all the
words in the set. Higher values on this measure correspond to greater contrast, and higher values on the attraction measure correspond to greater attraction. For
the 32 items in Experiment 2, the correlations were .39
and .47 for verbs and pronouns, respectively.
This is suggestive evidence that form-based variations in morphological contrastiveness play a part in
modulating differences in the strength of attraction, as
274
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
well as modulating the reliability of other types of
agreement (Spalek & Schriefers, 2004). It points toward
a unified account of a disparate set of observations
about attraction, including the reduction in attraction
that occurs for invariant plurals and the increase in attraction that occurs for plural collectives. The account,
tentatively, is that the relative frequency of a morphed
form affects its likelihood of spuriously attracting an
agreement target. Because frequency seems to affect
word forms more than abstract lexical entries (Griffin &
Bock, 1998; Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), this tightens the
link between the mechanisms of morphing and the occurrence of attraction.
General discussion
Fig. 9 summarizes the results from our experiments in
terms of the proportions of plural agreement targets
observed in each of nine combinations of grammatically
singular head nouns and grammatically singular or
plural local nouns. The conditions to the left of the
dotted line are those in which the agreement controllers
were notionally and grammatically singular, with only
local-noun variations in plural semantics or plural
morphology. The conditions to the right are those that
increased the likelihood of notionally plural construals,
with controllers having collective (C) heads or distributive (D) construals. It is apparent that the conditions in
Fig. 9. Proportions of plural agreement targets associated with
9 types of subject noun phrases in Experiments 1–5 (SS ¼ singular head, singular local noun; SSC ¼ singular head, singular
collective local noun; SPT ¼ singular head, invariant plural local noun; SP ¼ singular head, plural local noun; SPC ¼ singular
head, plural collective noun; DSPT ¼ distributive phrase, singular head with invariant plural local noun; DSP ¼ distributive
phrase, singular head, plural local noun; DCSP ¼ distributive
phrase, collective singular head, plural local noun; CSS ¼ collective singular head, singular local noun).
which controllers invited plural interpretations were the
ones in which the probabilities of plural pronouns differed from the probabilities of plural verbs. Under these
circumstances, plural pronouns were more likely than
plural verbs. Otherwise, plural pronouns and plural
verbs behaved similarly.
The observed similarities in pronoun and verb number support the existence of a common mechanism for
attraction. This is consistent with the marking and
morphing account and inconsistent with views that encompass less restricted uses of notional number in
agreement. Given the otherwise greater sensitivity of
pronouns to the notional number of their antecedents
when attraction was not in play, the equivalence of
pronouns and verbs in attraction to grammatical number (and in the absence of attraction to notional number) is especially notable.
With respect to number and number agreement, the
findings suggest some fundamental ways in which
pronouns are the same as verbs and some fundamental
ways in which pronouns and verbs differ in production.
One similarity in the number properties of pronouns
and verbs seems to be a mutual sensitivity to meaningbased number information in normal agreement with
normal controllers. When the intended referent of a
subject was a multitude, even when the grammatical
number of the subjectÕs head was singular, both pronoun number and verb number were more likely to be
plural. In support of this, notional plurality without
grammatical plurality in Experiments 3 and 4 yielded
increases in the usage of plural verbs as well as plural
pronouns.
The major difference between pronoun and verb
number appeared in their relative sensitivity to notional number in agreement. Although pronouns and
verbs both reflected the notional number behind their
antecedents and subjects, respectively, pronouns were
consistently more likely than verbs to be plural as a
consequence of this source of notional plurality.
The difference was most evident when subjects had
clashing semantic and morphological properties. With
collective head nouns (Experiment 3) and distributive
subjects (Experiments 4 and 5) creating notional plurality, pronouns exhibited plural number more than
verbs did.
This difference can be explained in terms of the
means by which pronouns and verbs get their initial
number values in agreement. Verb number agreement
occurs under the guidance of syntactic processes, with
the marking of subject noun phrases serving to carry
the notional number. This constitutes normal grammatical control of number. For pronouns, the maintenance of notional number is also supported by lexical
processes: Assuming number to be part of the semantics of lexical entries, including pronoun entries, the
selection of a plural pronoun under the guidance of a
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
plural notion will preserve notional plurality in the
form of lexical plurality throughout the formulation
process. Consequently, words that refer to the same
things are likely to share similar number features. This
we call concord in number agreement. Whereas number
control sets verb number equal to the morphologically
reconciled number of the subject noun phrase, in
number concord the lexicon bears a burden in selecting
and retrieving number-congruent words to represent
message elements in coreferential expressions. These
words include pronouns.
In the present work, the most significant similarity
between pronouns and verbs appeared as a byproduct of
the morphological implementation of agreement that
creates number attraction. Like verbs, pronouns were
insensitive to the notional properties of local nouns,
making them vulnerable to attraction only from morphologically represented grammatical properties. This
jibes with the claim that attraction occurs at a comparatively late point during structural integration (see
Fig. 1), when most of the lexical and structural features
of an utterance have been determined and the lexical and
structural features themselves are a primary focus of
processing. Consequently, the conceptual properties that
guide the initiation of agreement in production are less
important during integration than are linguistic properties such as morphological specifications and structural distances. During integration, neither verbs nor
pronouns are readily affected by the notional underpinnings of number.
What remains to be considered is why pronouns are
vulnerable to attraction, if they are indeed formulated as
independent words. Their independence must be limited,
constrained somehow by the linguistic number properties of accessible antecedents. The reliable occurrence of
attraction by itself implies that pronoun number can be
reconciled with antecedent number in a process similar
to subject–verb number agreement, though pronounantecedent agreement differs from subject–verb number
agreement in the power of notional effects. Why is this?
As explained in the introduction, it is unlikely to be
merely because pronoun agreement spans different
structural or temporal distances. The equivalence of
notional agreement and attraction for reflexive and tag
pronouns (Bock et al., 1999, 2004) discredits any simple
distributional explanations for differences between verbs
and pronouns.
Instead, we have proposed that pronouns (unlike
verbs) have a number value to begin with. When a
pronounÕs grammatical number value differs from the
reconciled number value of its antecedent, and the antecedent is accessible to the pronoun, the pronoun is
drawn into line with the antecedentÕs number. When this
occurs, and the number of the accessible antecedent has
been reconciled to reflect the number of a local noun
within the antecedent phrase, pronoun attraction will
275
ensue via the same processes that create verb attraction.
In related work (Eberhard et al., 2004), the impact of
these processes is captured in a model that uses the same
parameter values for verb and pronoun number and the
same reconciliation processes for the subjects of verbs
and the antecedents of pronouns. The only difference is
contributed by the intrinsic number of pronouns, which
verbs lack.
Consistent with absence of notional input to the
mechanisms behind attraction, in all of the experiments
in which the morphological features of local nouns
were varied (Experiments 1, 2, and 5), the strength of
attraction was comparable for pronouns and verbs.
Attraction changed in magnitude with changes in the
morphological properties of the elements bearing the
spurious number features, with the same variations
occurring for pronouns as for verbs. In particular,
there was more attraction after rare plurals than after
common plurals (Experiment 2) and more attraction
after common plurals than after invariant plurals (Experiment 5), to the same extent for pronouns as for
verbs.
Although we observed no tendency for verb or
pronoun number to be attracted to notional properties
of local nouns, we are well aware of the weaknesses of
the case. Our data are restricted to English, whose
agreement features and morphological properties are
impoverished by crosslinguistic standards. There are
concerns about the experimental task (as discussed at
greater length in Bock & Miller, 1991 and elsewhere)
and the properties of the measure. The task combines
both comprehension and production, and it is difficult
to tease their contributions apart. It remains very hard
to obtain better measures (e.g., chronometric measures) of critical events during sentence production
without either increasing the contribution of comprehension to the point where only single-word sentence
completions are elicited and their latency measured
(Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995) or dramatically decreasing the possibility of eliciting the
language of interest (e.g., by using pictured events in
company with eyetracking measures; Griffin & Bock,
2000). When the language of interest is abstract or
complex, elicitation by picture is at best impractical
(Bock, 1996).
Despite these weaknesses, we see compensating
strengths in the experiments. Against the absence of
notional effects on verb and pronoun attraction, we
demonstrated clear notional effects on verb and pronoun
agreement over a range of materials. Against the absence of notional effects on either verb or pronoun attraction, we demonstrated graded grammatical effects on
both verb and pronoun attraction, also over a range of
materials. In short, the independent variables of interest
were strong enough to produce effects on agreement,
and the dependent variables of interest were sensitive
276
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
enough to reflect grammatical number variations within
the same sources whose notional variations had no
impact.
What about evidence that notional properties do
matter to attraction? Thornton and MacDonald (2003)
carried out an ingenious set of studies in which speakers
were more likely to produce verbs that agreed in number
with local nouns when the verb was a plausible predication for the local noun (e.g., The album by the classical
composers were praised. . .) than when it was an implausible predication (e.g., The album by the classical
composers were played. . .). Although there is no evident
involvement of notional number in these effects, there is
another sort of semantic contribution from the local
noun.
This is an important result, though its bearing on the
explanation of attraction is uncertain. One source of
uncertainty is that verb number variations have causes
other than attraction. The traditional idea about how
verbs come to agree with something other than the
supposed subject stems from the familiar experience of
losing track of the intended subject. Anyone who has
paused to wonder about the appropriate number for an
upcoming verb realizes that verbs can be produced with
the wrong number because of revision or confabulation
of a subject in the midst of speaking. We will call this
predication confusion. Bock and Miller (1991, Experiment 3) carried out an experiment designed to create
predication confusion, and the results patterned differently from attraction with respect to notional variables
(namely, animacy).
Paradoxically, Thornton and MacDonald discounted
predication confusion as an explanation for their data
because singular local nouns failed to create systematic
plausibility effects. However, Bock and MillerÕs results
suggested that confusion is more likely in the presence of
plurals than of singulars, either because of complexity or
the attention-getting nature of plurals. In addition,
Thornton and MacDonald did not include conditions
that would allow confusion about the sentence subject to
be systematically distinguished from effects of number.
That is, there were no conditions in which local nouns
were more plausible subjects than the heads. In short, it
remains to be shown how much impact predication
confusion can create on agreement.
To conclude, we found that pronouns and verbs both
responded to variations in the notional number of subjects, but that pronouns were more likely to reflect the
notional plurality of subjects than verbs were. This
replicates Bock et al. (1999) but over a wider range of
critical conditions. Variations in the grammatical number properties of local nouns created attraction but
variations in the notional number of local nouns did not,
and the amount of attraction was equivalent for pronouns and verbs. This establishes for the first time that
pronouns are vulnerable to the same processes and same
sources of attraction that influence verb number. The
results support an account of agreement in which two
different mechanisms are at work (Bock et al., 2001;
Eberhard et al., 2004). One of the mechanisms, marking,
captures the meaning behind agreement in a form that
can be linguistically encoded, and it has different consequences for pronouns than for verbs. A second
mechanism, morphing, reconciles number information
within phrases that control agreement, with the same
consequences for pronouns as for verbs. These consequences include attraction.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by grants from
the National Science Foundation (BNS 90-09611, SBR
94-11627, and SBR 98-73450) and the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD21011). Some of the findings
were first reported at the 1992, 1993, and 2003 meetings
of the Psychonomic Society. We thank Elizabeth Octigan, Emma Brennan, Julie Delheimer, Danielle Holthaus, Mera Kachgal, Brian Kleiner, Patricia Kaiser,
Corinne McCarthy, Amy Philippon, Todd Reising, and
Kendra Wilson for assistance in carrying out the experiments, and Gary Dell, Fernanda Ferreira, Victor
Ferreira, Cynthia Fisher, Robert Hartsuiker, Karin
Humphreys, Antje Meyer, Gregory Murphy, Janet Nicol, Neal Pearlmutter, Martin Pickering, Jos van Berkum, and Gabriella Vigliocco for helpful discussions
about the research and this report. Correspondence may
be directed to Kathryn Bock ([email protected]), Beckman Institute, 405 North Mathews Avenue, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801,
USA.
Appendix. Experimental preambles
Experiment 1 (items 1–32) and Experiment 4 (items 1–16 in
Singular/Singular and Singular/Plural versions only; 1–8 are
distributive)
1. The slogan(s) on the poster(s) (lied)
2. The label(s) on the bottle(s) (disintegrated)
3. The name(s) on the sign(s) (flashed)
4. The picture(s) on the postcard(s) (faded)
5. The problem(s) in the school(s) (ceased)/(ended)a
6. The defect(s) in the car(s) (persisted)
7. The mistake(s) in the program(s) (multiplied)
8. The crime(s) in the city(ies) (decreased)
9. The memo(s) from the accountant(s) (arrived)
10. The letter(s) from the lawyer(s) (vanished)
11. The warning(s) from the expert(s) (intensified)
12. The check(s) from the stockbroker(s) (bounced)
13. The key(s) to the cabinet(s) (disappeared)
14. The door(s) to the office(s) (opened)
15. The bridge(s) to the island(s) (deteriorated)
K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278
Appendix (continued)
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
The
entrance(s) to the laboratory(ies) (changed)
tile(s) used to cover the wall(s) (fell)
guard(s) employed for the ceremony(ies) (laughed)
actor(s) hired to do the commercial(s) (quit)
computer(s) installed in the missile(s) (exploded)
mechanic(s) who repaired the tire(s) (sneezed)
detective(s) who solved the murder(s) (celebrated)
professor(s) who criticized the dean(s) (resigned)
receptionist(s) who greeted the visitor(s) (smiled)
boy(s) that liked the snake(s) (giggled)
dog(s) that chased the truck(s) (barked)
astronomer(s) that discovered the galaxy(ies) (died)
company(ies) that claimed the copyright(s) (sued)
table(s) that the student(s) painted (broke)
girl(s) that the teacher(s) questioned (blushed)
soldier(s) that the officer(s) accused (escaped)
bill(s) that the governor(s) recommended (passed)
Experiment 2
1. The strength of the soldier(s)/army(ies) (diminished)
2. The sight of the house(s)/village(s) (lingered)
3. The time for the student(s)/assembly(ies) (passed)
4. The purpose of the delinquent(s)/gang(s) (wavered)
5. The jealousy of the relative(s)/clan(s) (intensified)
6. The location of the tree(s)/forest(s) (changed)
7. The job for the singer(s)/choir(s) (resumed)
8. The support from the deputy(ies)/posse(s) (increased)
9. The need for the member(s)/committee(s) (lapsed)
10. The function of the judge(s)/jury(ies) (continued)
11. The view of the spectator(s)/audience(s) (faded)
12. The disappearance of the politician(s)/minority(ies)
(occurred)
13. The record of the player(s)/team(s) (improved)
14. The type of individual(s)/group(s) (varied)
15. The noise from the cow(s)/herd(s) (persisted)
16. The condition of the ship(s)/fleet(s) (worsened)
Experiment 3
1. The soldier/army with the incompetent commander(s)
(retreated)
2. The house/village beyond the hill(s) (burned)
3. The student/assembly outside the state building(s)
(protested)
4. The delinquent/gang with the machete(s) (ran)
5. The relative/clan of the Scottish monarch(s)
(disappeared)
6. The tree/forest near the factory(ies) (died)
7. The singer/choir for the church service(s) (arrived)
8. The deputy/posse with the inaccurate map(s) (vanished)
9. The member/committee of the union(s) (voted)
10. The judge/jury for the trial(s) (deliberated)
11. The spectator/audience at the tennis match(es)
(cheered)
12. The politician/minority at the meeting(s) (objected)
13. The player/team with the commercial contract(s) (won)
14. The individual/group behind the loudspeaker(s)
(complained)
15. The cow/herd behind the fence(s) (grazed)
16. The ship/fleet with the distinctive flag(s) (departed)
277
Appendix (continued)
Experiment 5
Unitary
1. The unhappy boy in the jacket/jackets/jeans (frowned)
2. The pretty little girl with the earring/earrings/braces
(whistled)
3. The former owner of the lawnmower/lawnmowers/pruning shears (relocated)
4. The display case for the lens/lenses/glasses (shattered)
5. The observatory with the telescope/telescopes/binoculars
(closed)
6. The drawer for the needle/needles/tweezers (jammed)
7. The theft of the countessÕs corset/corsets/panties
(backfired)
8. The pattern for the nightgown/nightgowns/pajamas
(disappeared)
9. The design for the helmet/helmets/goggles (won)
Distributive
10. The intended user of the hammer/hammers/pliers
(changed)
11. The normal wearer of the stocking/stockings/tights
(rejoiced)
12. The typical retailer for the razor/razors/scissors
(struggled)
13. The logo on the undershirt/undershirts/underpants
(frayed)
14. The handle of the shovel/shovels/tongs (broke)
15. The blue dye in the apron/aprons/overalls (ran)
16. The style of the designerÕs suit/suits/trousers (fizzled)
17. The color of the blazer/blazers/bermudas (faded)
18. The size of the knit shirt/shirts/pants (varied)
a
Ceased was changed to ended in Experiment 4.
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