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Long Distance Dependencies in Language Production
Another problem that a speaker faces when uttering a sentence is that of long
distance dependencies. For example, in "The cheap lawyer for the defendants investigates
the case by himself", the verb "investigates" and the reflexive pronoun "himself" must
agree with the singular subject "lawyer" and not with the intervening plural noun
"defendants". Kathryn Bock and I have been examining processes of number agreement
within sentences (e.g., Bock & Cutting, 1992). We have identified two levels of number
information that control agreement: grammatical number and notional number. Our results
suggest that subject-verb number agreement is controlled by grammatical number, while
subject-pronoun agreement is controlled by notional number (Bock, Eberhard, & Cutting, 1992; Cutting, Nicol, & Bock, 1995).
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Return to Dr. Cutting's Psycholinguistics Lab page
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