Comprehension of the copula: preschoolers (and sometimes adults) ignore subject-verb agreement during sentence processing.

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  • Additional Information
    • Source:
      Publisher: Cambridge Univ. Press Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 0425743 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1469-7602 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 03050009 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Child Lang Subsets: MEDLINE
    • Publication Information:
      Original Publication: London, New York, Cambridge Univ. Press.
    • Subject Terms:
    • Abstract:
      Subject-verb (SV) agreement helps listeners interpret the number condition of ambiguous nouns (The sheep is/are fat), yet it remains unclear whether young children use agreement to comprehend newly encountered nouns. Preschoolers and adults completed a forced choice task where sentences contained singular vs. plural copulas (Where is/are the [novel noun(s)]?). Novel nouns were either morphologically unambiguous (tup/tups) or ambiguous (/geks/ = singular: gex / plural: gecks). Preschoolers (and some adults) ignored the singular copula, interpreting /ks/-final words as plural, raising questions about the role of SV agreement in learners' sentence comprehension and the status of is in Australian English.
    • Contributed Indexing:
      Keywords: agreement; comprehension; language change
    • Publication Date:
      Date Created: 20191120 Date Completed: 20210128 Latest Revision: 20210128
    • Publication Date:
      20240628
    • Accession Number:
      10.1017/S0305000919000680
    • Accession Number:
      31739822