Agreement Attraction in Children’s Production
An Experimental Study in Brazilian Portuguese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.34.2.246-266Palavras-chave:
agreement attraction, children’s linguistic production, verbal number agreement, Brazilian PortugueseResumo
This study examines agreement attraction, a phenomenon in which a verb agrees in number with an intervening noun—the attractor—instead of the subject head (e.g., The observation of the results show…). Psycholinguistic research on adult speech has documented an asymmetry: attraction tends to occur when the subject head is singular and the attractor is plural. Here, we investigate whether Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children exhibit a similar pattern. We conducted a language production experiment using the referential communication paradigm (Nozari & Omaki, 2022). Children aged 5 to 7 participated in a game designed to elicit sentences with complex subjects (e.g., The snake near the elephants…), thereby inducing potential attraction effects. The number of the subject head and the attractor noun was manipulated between singular and plural. The dependent variable was the rate of agreement attraction in production. Results revealed that attraction was observed overall, whereas no clear attraction effect was found in the five-year-old group. Notably, children did not replicate the adult-like asymmetry: the singular-head/plural-attractor condition did not yield more errors than the reverse configuration. Our hypothesis is that variability of verb agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese may have influenced these results.
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