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This study clarifies the impact of switching context between noun and verb number agreement rules in written language production. In Experiment 1, children from grade 3 to 6 were asked to fill in sentences with nouns and verbs in either a switching condition (noun followed by verb) or a repeating condition (noun followed by noun). The results showed that third- and fourth-grade children produced more erroneous agreements in the switching condition than in the repeating condition, showing that switching between rules comes at a cost, whereas fifth- and sixth-grade participants’ performance was not affected by the switching context. Based on these findings, Experiment 2 aimed to assess whether a switching treatment offers a greater opportunity to improve the acquisition of grammatical agreement production, as compared to a simple treatment. Teachers from grade 3 gave either a switching treatment (mixed noun and verb exercises) or a simple treatment (noun exercises followed by verb exercises). The results show that children learned better from the switching treatment than from the simple treatment. These findings highlight the cost of switching between noun and verb agreement rules during the acquisition of grammatical number agreement and also how grammatical spelling acquisition can be improved at school.

Background: Disordered discourse in cases of senile dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) has mainly been described in conversation and picture description tasks. The referential communication task provides researchers and clinicians with new insights on the nature of these disorders. Aims: To study to what extent persons suffering from DAT can benefit from shared experience through trial repetition to achieve common reference. Methods & Procedures: Thirteen persons suffering from DAT at minimal or mild stage (MMSE score range=18-27) were compared with 13 healthy elderly adults (64-86 years) in neuropsychological assessment of executive functions and in a referential communication paradigm. To study how the two partners achieve mutual understanding by progressively elaborating a common ground, the task was repeated three times. Outcomes & Results: Persons with DAT produced a larger number of words than control participants and they benefited from the task repetition. However, they were less able to take into account previously shared information, used no definite referential expressions and were more idiosyncratic in their descriptions of the referent. This decline of communicative effectiveness was found not to relate closely to executive deficits. Conclusions: Collaborative exchanges allow healthy elderly persons to ground reference in common experience. This process is severely disturbed in persons with DAT, in relation to poor memory of preceding episodes or to other cognitive impairments. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure and 2 notes.)

Background: Writing is a complex activity involving various cognitive processes in the planning, the transcription and the revision of written texts. The present study focused on the revision of written texts within a developmental approach. Aims: The study aimed to examine whether children and adults use different procedures to detect and revise erroneous grammatical agreements. It was predicted that children would use a slow algorithmic procedure while adults would use a fast automatized procedure. Sample: One hundred and twenty participants from 5th grade to undergraduate levels (24 per level) participated in the study. Method: The participants were asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a visually presented sentence had any agreement error. The French experimental sentences were of the type 'The N1 of the N2 + Verb', in which N2 was either a plausible subject of the following verb (e.g., The guard of the prisoners watches) or an implausible subject (e.g., The guard of the safes watches). Correctness and latency of the responses were recorded. Results: The main results showed that only the younger participants were affected by the subject-role plausibility of N2, and that there was no difference in response latency between their correct and incorrect responses. These observations support the hypothesis that the younger participants systematically apply a time-consuming algorithmic procedure to verify the agreement; since one step of this procedure consists in searching for the subject of the verb, these participants were frequently misled by the subject-role plausibility of N2. On the contrary, the older participants were not affected by the plausibility of N2, but were frequently misled by erroneous agreements between N2 and the verb. These observations support the view that these older participants use a fast decision strategy based on the co-occurrence of formal indices. Their correct answers, however, were slower than their incorrect ones; this suggests that they also sometimes use a time-consuming controlled procedure. Conclusion: The study shows that along with the acquisition of writing expertise, the revising activity itself is progressively facilitated and gradually automatized by substituting a fast direct decision strategy for a slow and laborious use of revision rules.

The present research examined the quality of the phonological representations of French children with specific language impairment (SLI) and those with normal language development (NLD). Twenty-five children with SLI and 50 children with NLD matched on lexical age level participated in an auditory lexical decision task. The observations gathered in our study can be summarized as follows. First, children with a higher receptive lexical level performed better, and this was true both for children with NLD and children with SLI. Second, both children with NLD and those with SLI were more likely to reject pseudowords resulting from a modification affecting the number of syllables of a word than pseudowords resulting from a slight modification with the number of syllables unchanged. This difference, however, was greater for the children with SLI, who appeared to have much difficulty rejecting pseudowords resulting from slight modifications. Finally, the performance of children with SLI was particularly poor when presented with pseudowords resulting from a slight modification at the beginning or the end of a word. These findings are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of an under-specification of phonological representations in children with SLI.

Aims at demonstrating the gradual automatization of subject-verb agreement operation in young writers by examining developmental changes in the occurrence of agreement errors. Finds that subjects' performance moved from systematic errors to attraction errors through an intermediate phase. Concludes that attraction errors are a byproduct of the automatization of the implementation of the agreement process. (SC)

Two experiments are reported in which participants were orally presented with French sentences that they were required to write down. In a single-task condition, only single sentences were presented and the written recall concerned only these sentences. In a dual-task condition, a second task was added: to memorize an additional list of words or to do mental addition while writing down the sentences. The experimental sentences were all of the type 'Prep. + N1 + verb + subject' (e.g. Dans les trains passe le controleur, Along the trains comes the inspector) in which the preverbal noun constituted either a plausible or an implausible subject for the verb following. Results showed that: (a) number agreement was more likely to be correct when the preverbal noun was implausible as the subject of the sentence, (b) but when they had to transcribe sentences with an implausible preverbal noun, the participants' performance at a concurrent task was poorer. These two findings indicate that the plausibility of the subject role of the preverbal noun provides information that can be used to control the procedures which underlie the construction of the agreement., Number is one of a small set of basic conceptual categories that must be called upon during language production to create agreement between different grammatical elements in a sentence: e.g. [...]

Reading span was assessed in three conditions aiming at varying the processing demands of a reading task. In a Sentence Reading Condition, the participants read aloud lists of sentences and memorize the final word of each sentence as in the original task of Daneman and Carpenter. In two other conditions, each sentence was replaced either by a series of unrelated words (Word Reading Condition) or by a series of meaningless syllables (Syllable Reading Condition); in these two conditions, however, each series ended with the same test words as in the Sentence Reading Condition. There was no significant effect of the condition on the scores for reading span. It is concluded that the typically low scores on reading span are not so much due to the processing demands of the task as to the disruptive effects of the articulatory suppression which characterizes the original task.

Focuses on the effects of contextual demands on French-speaking children's spontaneous production of cleft sentences. The study shows that French children frequently produce cleft formulations when they contrast their own belief or knowledge with that of their addressee and when the matter of the disagreement concerns the agent of the action. (CB)