Morphological variability in the comprehension of agreement: an argument for representation over computation

By Corrine McCarthy. 2008

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous accounts of morphological variability disagree over whether its cause is representational or computational in nature. Under a computational account, variability is confined to production; under a representational account, variability extends to comprehension and is qualitatively similar to variability in production. This article presents experimental evidence from the comprehension and production of gender and number agreement in second language (L2) Spanish clitics and adjectives. Intermediate-level participants show variability across comprehension and production; across tasks, masculine defaults are adopted. Advanced-level participants show less variability, although evidence for masculine defaults emerges across tasks. Number agreement proved relatively unproblematic, except in the production of adjective agreement where singular defaults are systematically adopted by intermediate- and advanced-level speakers. The qualitative similarity of variability across comprehension and production supports a representational account; however, previous research disfavours an account based in syntactic deficits. This article argues for a theory of morphological variability that places the representational cause in the morphology, rather than the syntax.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ad7631c12c0934cbed4b060256fd48fe660e3f7

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Citations in the corpus

Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition (2016, background): “…Hawkins and Chan, 1997; Tsimpli and Dimitrakopoulou, 2007); (2) that gender features are underspecified (e.g. Hawkins and Casillas, 2008; McCarthy, 2008); (3) that L2 learners fall short of mapping gender forms to features in real-time processing (Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis;…”
Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability (2013, background): “First, L2ers resort to overgeneralizing a default gender (e.g. Bruhn de Garavito and White, 2003; Hawkins, 2009; McCarthy, 2008: White et al., 2004).”
Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender* (2012, background): “4 The Dutch gender data illustrate that on the MSIH approach, defaults may involve substitution as well as omission (McCarthy, 2008); as such, the nomenclature MISSING inflection is perhaps misleading.”
Plural-marking in L2 Korean: A feature-based approach (2013, background): “…those that are derivationally most complex, that is embedded most deeply in the feature hierarchy shown in Figure 1, will be acquired latest (for similar suggestions, see e.g. Harley and Ritter, 2002: 498; Hawkins and Casillas, 2008; Lardiere, 2000: 122–124, 2009: 215; McCarthy, 2008, 2012).”
Spanish gender agreement under complete and incomplete acquisition: Early and late bilinguals' linguistic behavior within the noun phrase* (2011, background): “From this perspective, variability, which involves “an alternation between correct and incorrect morphology” (McCarthy, 2008, p. 462), i.e., the failure to achieve native-like proficiency is explained in terms of a deficit in grammatical competence or representation, which reflects either a…”
Gender and number agreement in the oral production of Arabic Heritage speakers* (2012, background): “The overuse of the masculine and singular forms supports previous findings concerning the over-generalization of default inflectional morphology forms (McCarthy, 2007, 2008).”
MORPHOLOGICAL ERRORS IN SPANISH SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND HERITAGE SPEAKERS (2011, methodology): “To properly compare L2 learners and heritage speakers and because there is inherent variability in these two groups, all participants were asked to complete a written test of Spanish profi ciency—the same used in several other studies of L2 learners (McCarthy, 2008 ; White et al., 2004 ).”