Producing number agreement: How pronouns equal verbs

Journal ofMemory and

Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278Language

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, USAb University of Notre Dame, USAc 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 ut-

terances 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).

� 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 depen-

dencies 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 perfor-

mance 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 pro-

nouns 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).

0749-596X/$ - see front matter � 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserv

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2004.04.005

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 pro-

noun 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 ma-

jor differences between verbs and pronouns in their

agreement properties arise within the transition from

ed.

mail to: [email protected]

252 K. Bock et al. / Journal of Memory and Language 51 (2004) 251–278

meaning to morphology, when the linguistic raw mate-

rials for verb and pronoun number are separately as-

sembled.

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 con-

stitutes 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 ad-

joined phrases (i.e., the cabinet). We use the term ante-

cedent 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 dis-

tinction 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. more-

than-one semantic distinction, both might be expected to

carry the same types of one vs. more-than-one infor-

mation 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 con-

versely, that verbs are more likely than pronouns to

reflect the grammatical properties of controllers), con-

sistent 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 verb�s subject and a

pronoun�s 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 pre-

scriptive 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 se-

mantic origins.

A simple hypothesis about such disparities in verb

and pronoun number is in terms of natural distribu-

tional 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 immedi-

ately 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 pro-

nouns are in different sentences or clauses, they are less

likely to display the grammatical features of their con-

trollers (Meyer & Bock, 1999). Given these distribu-

tional differences, linguistic binding principles imply that

only reflexive pronouns should behave like verbs (An-

derson, 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 col-

lective 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, didn�t 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 distribu-

tional 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, pro-

nouns 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 pro-

noun 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

speaker�s 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) 251–278 253

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 con-

ventional 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 grammati-

cal 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 grammat-

ical 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.�s(1999) experiment, where the head nouns of subject

noun phrases in the critical conditions were grammati-

cally singular collective nouns, such as crowd. A perti-

nent 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 distribu-

tive 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 pro-

nouns 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.�s (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, in-

cluding 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-

matically plural: It does not seem to happen with in-

terlopers 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 exhib-

ited the same patterns of attraction as verbs, with no

more attraction for pronouns than for verbs. Specifi-

cally, 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 un-

ambiguously (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 inter-

lopers, 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 gram-

matical 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 & Mac-

Donald, 2003; Vigliocco & Franck, 1999, 2001; Vig-

liocco & Hartsuiker, 2002). For instance, on Thornton

and MacDonald�s 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, cre-

ating attraction. The strength of the influence from local

nouns may be weaker, because position is also a con-

straint 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


local nouns makes sense if pronoun number is normally

correlated with notional number.

A different set of predictions about the number be-

havior of pronouns and verbs comes from an extension

of the marking-and-morphing account of verb agree-

ment. 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 gram-

matical 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 num-

ber meaning in the linguistic root of the subject noun

phrase.

The second mechanism, morphing, calculates gram-

matical agreement features on the basis of the mor-

phological specifications of words selected to occur

Fig. 1. Overview of the components of numb

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 distrib-

utively. 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 rec-

onciliation 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

er formulation in language production.


reconciliation. First, attraction is more likely for speci-

fied 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 specifica-

tions (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 pro-

nouns, 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 pronouns� 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 no-

tional 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 Thorn-

ton 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 pro-

noun number, we created comparable environments for

verb and pronoun agreement, and examined the differ-

ences 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 des-

ignated 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 subject�s number.

For pronouns, we examined the number used with

exactly the same subjects, now serving as pronominal

antecedents. We elicited tag pronouns, which are pro-

nouns in questions such as The dogs barked, didn’t they?Tag pronouns agree in number and gender with the

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 at-

traction (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 re-

flect 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 intransi-

tive 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 com-

manders retreated, didn’t they ?

The experiments compared the rate of pronoun at-

traction to the rate of verb attraction when semantic

properties associated with the subject as a whole (as-

sumed 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 (Experi-

ment 5).

Extending Bock et al. (1999), the experiments also

examined the consequences for agreement of having a

subject controller (for verbs) or antecedent (for pro-

nouns) 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 investi-

gated 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 ex-

ception, the verb-eliciting conditions were replications of

previous work. The exception was Experiment 2, for

which the verb data were drawn from Bock and Eber-

hard (1993, Experiment 4). We omitted this replication

because the pronoun materials had been tested with

participants from the same source during the same pe-

riod of time, as in all the other experiments. Since every

replication duplicated previous findings, there was no


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 ob-

served for head nouns, for both verbs and pronouns.

The marking-and-morphing hypothesis predicts pre-

dominantly 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 pat-

tern 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 (Eber-

hard, 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-

Table 1

Sample preamble sets for Experiment 1

Number of

head noun

Number of

local nounVerb

Singular Singular The key to the ca

Singular Plural The key to the ca

Plural Singular The keys to the c

Plural Plural The keys to the c

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 introduc-

tory 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 an-

other 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 deter-

miner-adjective–noun), half singular and half plural.

The pronoun-eliciting versions of the fillers were created

Agreement target

Tag pronoun

binet The key to the cabinet disappeared

binets The key to the cabinets disappeared

abinet The keys to the cabinet disappeared

abinets The keys to the cabinets disappeared


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 verb-

completion task, and another four for the pronoun-

completion 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 experi-

mental 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 oc-

curred 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-com-

pletion 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 ex-

amples. 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 illus-

trated with four examples (all different from the list

items, with no number conflicts) and without any ex-

plicit instructions about the form that tag questions

take. The participants were asked to repeat each pre-

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 experi-

mental sentences). For any of the practice items, fail-

ures 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 comple-

tions more quickly and to speak more rapidly if either

rate slowed appreciably in the course of the experiment.

The sessions took approximately 15min and were re-

corded 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 re-

sponses contained one complete, correct repetition of

the sentence preamble that was followed, without in-

terruption 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 as-

signed to the Miscellaneous category. Most of these re-

sponses 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 as-

signed to one of three categories. Singular and Plural

responses contained one complete repetition of the

preamble immediately followed by the verb form didn’tand a singular or plural pronoun whose animacy fea-

tures 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 yiel-

ded 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 cate-

gory, which constituted 25.2% of the verb responses.

Table 2

Distribution of responses over categories in Experiment 1

Head/Local noun

number

Response category

Singular Plural Ambig-

uous

Miscel-

laneous

Verbs

Singular/Singular 316 7 167 22

Singular/Plural 236 43 121 112

Plural/Plural 9 329 107 67

Plural/Singular 6 299 121 86

Pronouns

Singular/Singular 457 9 — 46

Singular/Plural 272 61 — 179

Plural/Plural 30 362 — 120

Plural/Singular 48 364 — 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 minF 0 was estimated following the

procedures advised by Clark (1973). Table 3 gives the Fand min F 0 statistics and the degrees of freedom asso-

ciated 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 condi-

tions 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 be-

tween 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 sin-

gular local nouns), and for the interaction between head-

noun number and number target (verb or pronoun).

This interaction was due to a difference between pro-

nouns 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–sin-

gular 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 break-

down of these Miscellaneous Singular and Miscella-

neous Plural responses, along with the adjusted

proportions of plurals. The adjusted proportions include

both the Table 2 responses (those with correctly re-

peated preambles) and the miscellaneous responses.

Table 3

Analysis of variance results for all experiments

Source of variance By participants By items minF 0

Degrees of

freedom

F1value

Degrees of

freedom

F2value

Degrees of

freedom

Fvalue

Experiment 1

Agreement target 1,124 7.4 1,31 1.2y 1,42 1.0y

Head noun number 1,124 3851.0 1,31 2182.0 1,70 1393.0

Local noun number 1,124 42.6 1,31 12.2 1,50 9.5

Agreement target�Head noun number 1,124 12.1 1,31 6.0 1,65 4.0

Agreement target�Local noun number 1,124 .3y 1,31 .4y 1,110 .2y

Head noun number�Local noun number 1,124 65.3 1,31 28.6 1,63 19.6

Agreement target�Head noun number�Local

noun number

1,124 3.6y 1,31 1.1y 1,52 .9y

Experiment 2: Collective local nouns

Agreement target 1,93 .5y 1,14 .0y 1,14 .0y

Local noun type 1,93 6.2 1,14 2.9y 1,29 2.0y


Agreement target�Local noun type 1,93 .6y 1,14 .9y 1,65 .4y

Agreement target�Local noun number 1,93 1.0y 1,14 .0y 1,14 .0y

Local noun type�Local noun number 1,93 5.2 1,14 2.0y 1,26 1.4y

Agreement target�Local noun type�Local

noun number

1,93 .3y 1,14 .4y 1,60 .2y

Experiment 3: Collective head nouns

Agreement target 1,74 11.9 1,15 30.2 1,81 8.6

Head noun type 1,74 60.2 1,15 39.0 1,38 23.7


Agreement target�Head noun type 1,74 13.1 1,15 11.6 1,46 6.2

Agreement target�Local noun number 1,74 .8y 1,15 3.0y 1,88 .7y

Head noun type�Local noun number 1,74 1.1y 1,15 .3y 1,25 .3y

Agreement target�Head noun type�Local

noun number

1,74 1.6y 1,15 5.7 1,87 1.3y

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

noun number

— — 1,14 1.2y — —

Agreement target�Critical noun type�Position

of critical noun

— — 1,14 8.0 — —

Agreement target�Local noun number�Position

of critical noun

— — 1,14 1.6y — —

Critical noun type�Local noun number�Position

of critical noun

— — 1,14 .5y — —

Agreement target�Critical noun type�Local

noun number�Position of critical noun

— — 1,14 7.2 — —

Experiment 4: Unitary and distributive subject noun phrases

Agreement target 1,83 1.4y 1,14 11.3 1,96 1.2

Distributivity 1,83 1.7y 1,14 .02y 1,14 .02y



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.

Table 3 (continued)

Source of variance By participants By items minF 0

Degrees of

freedom

F1value

Degrees of

freedom

F2value

Degrees of

freedom

Fvalue

Agreement target�Distributivity 1,83 9.0 1,14 2.1y 1,21 1.7y

Agreement target�Local noun number 1,83 .8y 1,14 12.3 1,92 .8y

Distributivity�Local noun number 1,83 2.5y 1,14 .04y 1,14 14.4

Agreement target�Distributivity�Local noun

number

1,83 7.6 1,14 1.7y 1,21 1.4y

Experiment 5: Intrinsic plural local nouns

Agreement target 1,135 .2y 1,16 2.8y 1,149 .2y

Local noun type 2,270 52.9 2,32 10.4 2,46 8.7

Agreement target�Local noun type 2,270 .3y 2,32 .1y 2,56 .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

Response category Adjusted

plural

proportionMiscella-

neous

singular

Miscella-

neous

plural

Verbs

Singular/Singular 35 8 .04

Singular/Plural 15 10 .17

Plural/Plural 7 67 .96

Plural/Singular 5 24 .97

Pronouns



Plural/Plural 27 120 .89

Plural/Singular 17 126 .88

Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents the com-

bined totals of the miscellaneous responses with the Singulars

and Plurals from Table 2. The tabulated miscellaneous re-

sponses 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.


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 mat-

ched were similar to the differences found among the

primary responses. Specifically, when the head noun

was singular and the local noun plural, more pro-

nouns and verbs were produced as plurals than when

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 (combin-

ing 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.


Discussion

Consistent with the attraction prediction from mark-

ing 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

nounwas plural and the local noun singular, neither verbs

nor pronouns were significantly affected by the local

noun�s 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 pro-

nouns implies that pronoun number is influenced by the

grammatical number properties of the pronoun�s ante-

cedents.

Pronouns displayed different agreement patterns than

verbs did when head nouns were plural. One interpre-

tation 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 in-

fluence 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 noun�s 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. How-

ever, 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 no-

tional 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, de-

spite having a notionally singular reading, while col-

lective 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 no-

tional 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 pro-

posals in which notional information is continuously

accessible to agreement or in which agreement features

are determined by correlated constraints. So, in Exper-

iment 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, pro-

nouns should be no more likely than verbs to be at-

tracted 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/sin-

gular local condition in this and the remaining experi-

ments, to gain power for the singular head/plural local

contrast.

The participants, materials, list construction, experi-

mental 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 ex-

periments. The participants were always native English

speakers, and none took part in more than one experi-

ment. 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 pronoun-

eliciting versions always ended with the past-tense form

of an intransitive verb.

Filler preambles were made up of simple and com-

plex noun phrases; the simple phrases included a deter-

miner 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 ob-

jects, 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-


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, sub-

ject to the constraint that at least two fillers separated

the experimental trials. The experimental preambles

were counterbalanced to ensure that every list con-

tained 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 presenta-

tion. Different male and female speakers recorded the

materials for each experiment, but within each experi-

ment 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 participants� responses followed the cri-

teria 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 partici-

pant and item, as in Experiment 1. The dependent var-

iable (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.

Materials

The verb conditions from this experiment were re-

ported 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

Table 5

Sample preamble set for Experiment 2

Type and number

of local nounVerb

Individual

Singular The record of the player

Plural The record of the players

Collective

Singular The record of the team

Plural The record of the teams

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 ma-

terials.

Procedure

The procedure was the same as in the previous ex-

periment.

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 mor-

phology (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 verb-

and pronoun-eliciting conditions, respectively. The

difference in these percentages was due mostly to the

existence of ambiguous responses for verbs, which oc-

curred on 18.2% of the verb trials.

Results

Fig. 3 gives the overall proportions of plural agree-

ment 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

Agreement target

Tag pronoun

The record of the player improved

The record of the players improved

The record of the team improved

The record of the teams improved


collective and individual plural local nouns (relative to pro-

portions of plural targets after collective and individual singular

local nouns) in Experiment 2.

Table 6

Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experiment 2

Type and

number of

local noun

Response category

Singular Plural Ambiguous Miscella-

neous

Verbs

Individual

Singular 138 0 35 19

Plural 96 28 43 25

Collective

Singular 145 0 25 22

Plural 86 36 37 33

Pronouns

Individual

Singular 180 0 — 12

Plural 143 30 — 19

Collective

Singular 178 2 — 12

Plural 99 43 — 50


pronouns.

Table 7



Local noun

number

produced


plural

proportionMiscellaneous

singular

Miscellaneous

plural

Verbs

Individual

Singular 19 0 .00

Plural 15 2 .21

Collective

Singular 27 0 .00

Plural 7 5 .31

Pronouns

Individual

Singular 12 0 .00

Plural 11 2 .17

Collective

Singular 21 3 .02

Plural 10 2 .29




sponses 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.


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

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 s6 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 pro-

duced. Included among the responses are those with

errors in preamble repetitions and those with tag ques-

tions 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 number-

marked 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


singular individual nouns to create attraction, for either

verbs or pronouns. For verbs, there were no plural re-

sponses 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 pro-

nouns. 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 sin-

gular 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 dis-

cussion 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

Table 8


Type of head

noun

Number of

local nounVerb

Individual Singular The player with the commercial

Plural The player with the commercial

Collective Singular The team with the commercial c

Plural The team with the commercial c

pronouns should be more likely than verbs to be plural.

Previous experiments have found support for this pre-

diction (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 predic-

tions 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 in-

troductory 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 Ex-

periments 1 and 2.

Design and scoring

The three experimental factors were head-noun type

(collective or individual), local-noun number (singular

Agreement target

Tag pronoun

contract The player with the commercial contract won

contracts The player with the commercial contracts won

ontract The team with the commercial contract won

ontracts The team with the commercial contracts won

Fig. 4. Proportions of plural agreement targets produced in

Experiment 3 after collective and individual singular head

nouns (with singular local nouns).


or plural), and number target (verb or pronoun).

Orthogonal combinations of these three factors yielded

eight conditions. Participants received four items rep-

resenting 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 pro-

nouns, 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.

Results

Overall, the type of head noun (collective or indi-

vidual) 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 ac-

count, it is evident that much of this was due to pro-

nouns: 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 grammati-

cally 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

Table 9


Head noun

type

Local noun

numberSingular

Verbs

Individual Singular 111

Plural 73

Collective Singular 82

Plural 55

Pronouns


Plural 75


Plural 50

Note. The Ambiguous response category did not apply to pronou

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

Response category

Plural Ambiguous Miscellaneous

2 64 15

16 66 37

11 79 20

40 67 30

7 — 45

26 — 91

68 — 36

69 — 73

ns.

Fig. 5. Overall proportions of plural pronouns and verbs pro-

duced with collective local nouns (upper panel) in Experiment 2

and the same collectives as head nouns (lower panel) in Ex-

periment 3.


pronouns and verbs, with overall increases of .24 and

.18, respectively.

For miscellaneous responses, the distribution of sin-

gular 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 calcu-

lated from the primary Singular and Plural response

categories.

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 posi-

tion 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 sin-

gular 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

Table 10

Production of singular and plural agreement for miscellaneous respo

Head noun type

produced

Local noun number

producedMiscellaneous

Verbs


Plural 3


Plural 3

Pronouns


Plural 13


Plural 7

Note. The adjusted plural proportion represents plural responses w

Singulars and Plurals from Table 9. The tabulated miscellaneous resp

because the local noun numbers that were produced in Miscellaneous

presented.

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

nses in Experiment 3

Response category Adjusted plural

proportionsingular Miscellaneous plural

0 .02

2 .19

4 .14

4 .43

9 .08

3 .25

25 .47

25 .62

ithin the combined total of the miscellaneous responses and the

onses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table 9

responses often did not match the head and local noun numbers


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 re-

gardless of whether the critical noun was the head or

local noun and the number target was a verb or a pro-

noun, 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 indi-

vidual 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 in-

teraction in which local noun number figured.

There is a fairly straightforward interpretation of this

superficially complicated pattern in terms of marking-

and-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 au-

dience at the tennis matches can be interpreted as refer-

ring 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

pronoun�s initial number value. With distributive en-

hancement, when the notional number is plural, the

pronoun will be plural. A plural local noun can do little

more to influence the pronoun�s number, apart from the

normal morphing operations that create attraction.

Experiment 4

Experiment 3 provided further support for the as-

sumption that pronouns differ from verbs in their nor-

mal agreement properties even with superficially

identical number controllers. Specifically, pronouns

were more likely than verbs to reflect the notional plu-

rality of collective head nouns. Verbs tended to be sin-

gular, in apparent agreement with the grammatical

singularity of most collectives in American English.

Most clearly after collective heads with singular local

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 differ-

ential impact on verb and pronoun number.

If pronouns are genuinely more sensitive to the no-

tional 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 inter-

pretation. 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 distrib-

utive 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 com-

pletions. 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 notion-

al-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 verb-

eliciting and pronoun-eliciting versions. There were two

changes to the items from Experiment 1. Only the

Table 12

Distribution of responses over scoring categories in Experi-

ment 4

Preamble type

and head/local

noun number

Response category

Singular Plural Ambigu-

ous

Miscel-

laneous

Verbs

Unitary



Distributive



Pronouns

Unitary



Distributive




pronouns.

Table 11


Number ofhead

noun

Number of

local noun

Number target

Verb Tag pronoun

Notionally singular preamble

Singular Singular The letter from the lawyer The letter from the lawyer vanished

Singular Plural The letter from the lawyers The letter from the lawyers vanished

Notionally plural preamble

Singular Singular The picture on the postcard The picture on the postcard faded

Singular Plural The picture on the postcards 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: Be-

cause 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 within-

participants factors of preamble type (unitary or dis-

tributive) 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 sub-

tracting the proportions of plurals in the control con-

ditions (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 sig-

nificant 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,

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 re-

flects 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 dif-

ferences associated with the construal of the preamble.

For pronouns, however, six of the eight distributive

items showed a strong tendency to elicit plural pro-

nouns. Only two of the unitary items behaved similarly.

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.

Fig. 7. Relative proportions of plural pronouns and verbs

produced for individual items in the unitary and distributive

conditions in Experiment 4.

Table 13



Preamble type and

head/local noun

number produced


plural

proportionMiscella-

neous

singular

Miscella-

neous

plural

Verbs

Unitary



Distributive



Pronouns

Unitary



Distributive






sponses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table

12 because the head and local noun numbers that were pro-

duced in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head

and local noun numbers presented.


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

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 pro-

nouns, the table also includes the agreement results for

miscellaneous responses with tag verbs other than didn’t.

Discussion

In the same way that pronouns more than verbs

appeared to capture the distributive possibilities in col-

lective head nouns in Experiment 3, pronouns in Ex-

periment 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 ter-

minology of Experiments 2 and 3). In contrast, distrib-

utive phrases refer to a type with multiple tokens.

Consequently, a phrase such as the picture on the post-

cards implies several instances of the same picture dis-

tributed over many postcards, though picture is likewise


an individual noun. Regardless, in Experiment 4 pro-

nouns 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 elimi-

nating the concreteness difference leads to more plural

verb agreement with distributive than unitary subjects.

Eberhard�s finding adds an important qualification to

Bock and Miller�s 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 proper-

ties 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 lan-

guages 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 lan-

guages have easy-to-find instances of semantic incon-

sistencies. 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 be-

longs 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 neu-

ter). 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 underpin-

nings. 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 differ-

ence: A lone cow is a cow, but a pair are cows. To

highlight the contrast with intrinsic morphological fea-

tures, 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 in-

trinsic 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 plu-

rals, 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 morphing�s 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 con-

trols, was no larger than the amount of attraction trig-

gered 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 in-

trinsic and extrinsic plurals provide our last test for the

extension of marking-and-morphing mechanisms to

pronouns. Morphing creates attraction. If pronoun at-

traction is mediated by the same processes that create

verb attraction, pronouns should exhibit the same

morphological sensitivity as verbs, being more attracted


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 in-

vulnerable as verbs to the notional properties of at-

tracting 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 no-

tionally singular, the relevant notional number here,

in contrast to the local nouns in Experiment 2, was

singular.

Method

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 pream-

bles 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 con-

tained 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

Table 14

Sample preamble set for Experiment 5 with notional number ratings

Local noun

Unitary Me

notio

num

rati

Verb-eliciting preambles (and verb for pronoun-eliciting preambles)

Singular The drawer for the needle (jammed) 1.2

Extrinsic plural The drawer for the needles (jammed) 1.2

Intrinsic plural The drawer for the tweezers (jammed) 1.2

‘‘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 intervalwas .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 ex-

perimental preambles. The fillers and experimental pre-

ambles were assembled into six lists.

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 condi-

tions. Note that the distributions of unitary and dis-

tributive items were balanced by items, but not by

participants.

Results

Table 15 shows the distribution of responses, in-

cluding a breakdown for distributive and unitary items.

Fig. 8 depicts the main results in terms of the propor-

tions of plural responses in each condition. For both

pronouns and verbs, more plurals occurred after ex-

trinsic 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.

for materials in each condition

Agreement target

an

nal

ber

ng

Distributive Mean

notional

number

rating

2 The style of the designer�s suit (fizzled) 1.22

8 The style of the designer�s suits (fizzled) 1.42

8 The style of the designer�s trousers (fizzled) 1.26


singular, extrinsic plural, and intrinsic plural local nouns in

Experiment 5.

Table 16



Local noun type

produced


plural

proportionMiscella-

neous

singular

Miscella-

neous

plural

Verbs

Singular 18 2 .01

Extrinsic plural 9 2 .21

Intrinsic plural 9 1 .16

Pronouns

Singular 24 3 .02

Extrinsic plural 35 13 .21

Intrinsic plural 21 6 .14




sponses do not correspond to those in the same rows in Table

15 because the head and local noun numbers that were pro-

duced in Miscellaneous responses often did not match the head

and local noun numbers presented.

Table 15


Local-noun

condition

Scoring category

Singular Plural Ambiguous Miscel-

laneous

Verbs

Singular

Unitary 134 0 55 18

Distributive 136 1 56 14

Extrinsic plural

Unitary 109 13 63 22


Intrinsic plural

Unitary 114 7 69 17


Pronouns

Singular

Unitary 193 0 — 14

Distributive 178 4 — 25

Extrinsic plural

Unitary 156 11 — 40


Intrinsic plural

Unitary 181 12 — 14


Note. Ambiguous responses occurred only for verbs.


Although the materials were designed to control

rather than to manipulate distributivity, in one cell of

the item design there were preambles that consistently

(and necessarily) differed in rated notional number

from the others (see Table 14). These were the dis-

tributive 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 pro-

nouns and verbs differ in the magnitude of the unitary/

distributive difference: The unitary/distributive differ-

ence for pronouns was larger than the same difference

for verbs (.27 to .21). Though the corresponding three-

way 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 de-

scribed for previous experiments. Combining the

agreement patterns in the miscellaneous responses with

those in the strictly scored Singular and Plural re-

sponses led to no changes in the overall findings. Note

that the tabulation is not broken down between unitary

and distributive items because the miscellaneous re-

sponses could alter the distributive properties of the

preambles presented.

Discussion

For both pronouns and verbs, extrinsic plurals yiel-

ded significantly more attraction than intrinsic plurals


did. The magnitude of this effect was very much the

same for both types of targets, suggesting that the at-

traction 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 in-

trinsic plurals were judged more similar to each other in

notional number than were intrinsic and extrinsic plu-

rals. There was no significant difference between singu-

lars and intrinsic plurals (with ratings of 1.17 and 1.20

on a scale between 1 and 2), and both differed signifi-

cantly from the extrinsic plurals (which had a rating of

1.75).

Despite the substantial differences between intrinsic

and extrinsic plurals in their notional number constru-

als, 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 mor-

phological properties of intrinsic and extrinsic plurals

(Bock et al., 2001), giving further support to a mor-

phological 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 pro-

nouns 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 pro-

nouns in Experiment 4. In all cases, however, the at-

traction patterns for pronouns were the same as those

for verbs.

These trends argue for divergent avenues from no-

tional plurality to plural agreement in pronouns and

verbs, but with similar implementation processes creat-

ing attraction for both kinds of agreement targets. In

Experiment 5, the magnitude of attraction from gram-

matically plural local nouns was the same for pronouns

and verbs and did not vary with changes in the con-

troller�s 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.

Still open is the question of what creates the differ-

ence 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 at-

traction 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 no-

where else.

A different explanation rests on lexical contrastive-

ness. Extrinsic plurals (like extrinsic genders in lan-

guages 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 fre-

quency relative to their corresponding singulars. Per-

haps something analogous to the amount of competition

that a plural experiences from its singular counterpart

contributes to the plural�s 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 fre-

quency-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 pro-

portions of plural verbs (or plural pronouns) used after

(a) singular heads with plural local nouns and (b) sin-

gular heads with singular local nouns. The contrast

measure represented the difference in frequencies be-

tween 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 fre-

quency). 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 corre-

spond to greater contrast, and higher values on the at-

traction 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 varia-

tions in morphological contrastiveness play a part in

modulating differences in the strength of attraction, as


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 at-

traction 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 oc-

currence 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 distribu-

tive (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 (SS¼ sin-

gular head, singular local noun; SSC¼ singular head, singular

collective local noun; SPT¼ singular head, invariant plural lo-

cal noun; SP¼ singular head, plural local noun; SPC¼ singular

head, plural collective noun; DSPT¼distributive phrase, sin-

gular head with invariant plural local noun; DSP¼ distributive

phrase, singular head, plural local noun; DCSP¼ distributive

phrase, collective singular head, plural local noun; CSS¼ col-

lective singular head, singular local noun).

which controllers invited plural interpretations were the

ones in which the probabilities of plural pronouns dif-

fered 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 num-

ber support the existence of a common mechanism for

attraction. This is consistent with the marking and

morphing account and inconsistent with views that en-

compass 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 num-

ber (and in the absence of attraction to notional num-

ber) 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 meaning-

based 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 subject�s head was singular, both pro-

noun 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 no-

tional 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 plu-

rality, 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 gram-

matical control of number. For pronouns, the mainte-

nance of notional number is also supported by lexical

processes: Assuming number to be part of the seman-

tics of lexical entries, including pronoun entries, the

selection of a plural pronoun under the guidance of a


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 mor-

phologically represented grammatical properties. This

jibes with the claim that attraction occurs at a compar-

atively 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 prop-

erties such as morphological specifications and struc-

tural distances. During integration, neither verbs nor

pronouns are readily affected by the notional under-

pinnings 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 proper-

ties 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 pronoun-

antecedent 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

pronoun�s grammatical number value differs from the

reconciled number value of its antecedent, and the an-

tecedent is accessible to the pronoun, the pronoun is

drawn into line with the antecedent�s 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

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 (Ex-

periment 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 mea-

sures) of critical events during sentence production

without either increasing the contribution of compre-

hension to the point where only single-word sentence

completions are elicited and their latency measured

(Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Semenza, 1995) or dra-

matically 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 ab-

sence of notional effects on either verb or pronoun at-

traction, 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


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 predi-

cation for the local noun (e.g., The album by the classical

composers were praised. . .) than when it was an im-

plausible 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, Experi-

ment 3) carried out an experiment designed to create

predication confusion, and the results patterned differ-

ently 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 Miller�s 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 sub-

jects, 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 num-

ber 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 pro-

nouns 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 con-

sequences 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 conse-

quences 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 Insti-

tutes 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 Octi-

gan, Emma Brennan, Julie Delheimer, Danielle Holt-

haus, Mera Kachgal, Brian Kleiner, Patricia Kaiser,

Corinne McCarthy, Amy Philippon, Todd Reising, and

Kendra Wilson for assistance in carrying out the ex-

periments, and Gary Dell, Fernanda Ferreira, Victor

Ferreira, Cynthia Fisher, Robert Hartsuiker, Karin

Humphreys, Antje Meyer, Gregory Murphy, Janet Ni-

col, Neal Pearlmutter, Martin Pickering, Jos van Ber-

kum, and Gabriella Vigliocco for helpful discussions

about the research and this report. Correspondence may

be directed to Kathryn Bock ([email protected]), Beck-

man 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)


Appendix (continued)

16. The entrance(s) to the laboratory(ies) (changed)

17. The tile(s) used to cover the wall(s) (fell)

18. The guard(s) employed for the ceremony(ies) (laughed)

19. The actor(s) hired to do the commercial(s) (quit)

20. The computer(s) installed in the missile(s) (exploded)

21. The mechanic(s) who repaired the tire(s) (sneezed)

22. The detective(s) who solved the murder(s) (celebrated)

23. The professor(s) who criticized the dean(s) (resigned)

24. The receptionist(s) who greeted the visitor(s) (smiled)

25. The boy(s) that liked the snake(s) (giggled)

26. The dog(s) that chased the truck(s) (barked)

27. The astronomer(s) that discovered the galaxy(ies) (died)

28. The company(ies) that claimed the copyright(s) (sued)

29. The table(s) that the student(s) painted (broke)

30. The girl(s) that the teacher(s) questioned (blushed)

31. The soldier(s) that the officer(s) accused (escaped)

32. The 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)

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/prun-

ing 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 countess�s 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 designer�s suit/suits/trousers (fizzled)17. The color of the blazer/blazers/bermudas (faded)

18. The size of the knit shirt/shirts/pants (varied)

aCeased was changed to ended in Experiment 4.

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