ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study with native French speaking adults was two-fold: (1) to investigate the factors that affect the detection of verbal agreement violations in the auditory modality, in French sentence processing, and (2) to explore a recent technique of auditory sentence processing, using what we call "cued grammaticality", intended to improve detection times. Though focusing on the French language, this study was designed with a crosslinguistic perspective and follows the Competition Model (CM) in its general hypotheses (MacWhinney, 1987). CM proposes that in processing sentence information, each language assigns differing weights to language cues. Research in French has lead to important changes in the model, revolving around the competition of cues across modalities and across different stages of development in children (Kail, 1989). French adults in the auditory modality tend to rely on verbal agreement more than other sources of information (e.g. word order). Kail and Bassano (1995) in an on-line study of French sentence processing, predicted that verbal agreement violations would be detected significantly faster than word order violations. However, this finding was affected by temporal distance, which can be manipulated by placing a set of words between the noun and verb in the subject-verb (SV) target. Consider the following example:
#1 Sur la piste, le jongleur, avec prudence, ont On the stage, the juggler, with caution, had [pl.]
lancé les couteaux deux par deux thrown the knives two by two.
