Resumen de Les erreurs d'accord sujet-verbe en production écrite
Michel Hupet, Marie-Anne Schelstraete, Nathalie Demaeght, Michel Fayol
To account for subject-verb agreement errors which can be observed in sentences written by literate adults (e.g., The daughter of the neighbors come), the present study examined a two-step processing model. The first step consists of automatic activation of a singular or plural verb form depending on whether the closest preverbal noun is singular or plural ; as the outcome of this first step, the verb agrees with the nearest noun, giving rise to what has been called «proximity concord» errors. A second step prevents the occurrence of erroneous subject-verb agreements that would be unavoidable if the writer had no control on the outcome of the first step. This second step consists of an editing-check process allowing the writer to carry out a pre-graphical editing of the agreement. Two experiments are reported in which subjects were asked to perform simultaneously two tasks : a) to transcribe a sentence that was orally presented and, b) to mentally add numbers that they heard during the transcription. The results of these experiments supported two predictions of the processing model of number agreement in writing : a) the editing-check step consumed cognitive resources ; the agreement errors were greatly increased by the temporary cognitive overload (as is the case in a double task paradigm) preventing the subjects from carrying out the control processes; b) the implementation of the editing-check stage depended on the prior detection of potential errors, which occurs, for example, when the preverbal item is not a semantically plausible subject of the verb.
