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This study examined on-line processing of verbal and nominal agreement in French sentences. In a grammaticality judgment experiment, subjects were asked to detect as quickly as possible agreement violations : number and/or person in verbal agreement and gender and/or number in nominal agreement. Two factors were manipulated : 1) predictability (number of cues predicting an agreement) ; 2) violation size (number of dimensions violated).
As predicted by structural constraints, nominal violations (intraphrasal) were detected more rapidly than verbal ones (interphrasal) . Predictability and violation size did have an effect on judgments of grammaticality but their interactions were more complex than predicted. As hypothesized, for verbal agreement, high predictability and small violation size lengthened detection times and increased errors. For nominal agreement, the pattern is reversed : low predictability and large violation size lengthened detection times and increased errors. These contrastive results obtained in French are discussed in the light of some factors : structural and perceptive ones. They underline the necessity to conduct further studies on each type of agreement independently.
