UCLA

When a subject NP has a singular head noun and a plural noun in some lower syntactic phrase (i.e. local noun), occasionally a plural verb will be produced in a sentence (i.e., agreement attraction) (Bock 1991,Bock et al. 2001). Evidence from production (Eberhard 2005) and comprehension (Badecker 2007, Wagers 2009) studies have conflicting accounts for the mechanisms at play in these agreement attraction sentences (i.e. Marking and Morphing and cues-based retrieval). As of yet, however, neither account has incorporated prosody into our understanding of agreement despite what is known about prosody's role in sentence processing (Frazier 2006). This study bridges these areas of processing by investigating the role of phrasing in the processing of subject-verb agreement. Results of the current study show that while prosodic phrasing has little to no direct effect on the agreement mechanism's accuracy, phrasing an intervening plural local noun and a plural verb into separate intonation phrases does speed up how quickly participants judge these agreement attraction sentences as unacceptable.