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The objective of this study was to analyze and to understand conditions for subject-verb agreement errors, in children and adults. We tested the influence of some parameters on the occurrence of these errors. Seventy-two pupils and students were orally proposed sentences to write down. The sentences were : « Noun 1 (subject) + Verb 1 + Noun 2 (object). Adverbial phrase + Pronoun 1 (refering to Noun 1) + Pronoun 2 (refering to Noun 2) + Verb 2. » The two nouns and the two pronouns were either matched or mismatched in number. Thus, an error appeared when the second verb agreed with the second pronoun instead of the first pronoun. The sentences were in the present and in the French past indicative (the « imperfect » tense), in order to compare the tense effect on the proportion of agreement errors. Moreover, the sentences were either followed or not by a series of five monosyllabic words (additive cognitive load). The hypotheses predicted that the proportion of agreement errors would increase when the verb was conjugated with the past indicative comparatively to the present, when the working memory was overloaded and when the pronouns mismatched. Results showed that the interaction between subject pronouns and object pronouns was significant for the two tenses and the two age groups. Writers made more errors when the two pronouns differed in number. The cognitive load had a significant effect only for the present tense in children and adults. Thus, in French, it seems that the agreement of a verb involves different cognitive resources as a function of the tenses used in sentences. However, there was no general tense effect on the proportion of agreement errors.
