Regular Plurals. The room for the sick kids . . .
Regular Plurals. The class of kids . . . When the head noun was non-collective, the participants made more agreement errors with regular plural. However, the difference between the conditions was not substantially different. With collective heads, even though participants occasionally completed both type of sentences with a plural agreement, the rate of erroneous agreement marker was substantially low with irregular plurals. Their findings suggested that overt plural marking may increase the probability of having agreement errors in certain conditions. However, the frequency effect should be taken into account when irregular plurals are tested due to the suggested interaction between irregularity and frequency effects (Xxxxx, Badecket, & Xxxxxxxxx, 2003). To circumvent this problem, Xxxxx, Xxxxxx, and Xxxxxxxxxxxx (2020) conducted a self-paced reading experiment where they controlled the attractor’s frequency and irregularity. They have manipulated the number of the attractor (plural x singular), the orthographical type of the attractor (atypical plural x typical plural), the frequency of the attractor (high x medium x low), and the number marking on the verb (plural x singular). One set of experimental conditions can be found in (35).
