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Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278 Journal of Memory and Language www.elsevier.com/locate/jml 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 254 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 256 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 73 266 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 268 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. References Anderson, S. R. (1992). 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