Distance Effects in Number Agreement

One pronoun production experiment and one pronoun comprehension experiment were performed to investigate the role of grammatical number information in long-distance anaphora, with referent and pronoun either in adjacent sentences or separated by an intervening sentence. The experiments tested the assumption that the influence of grammatical number relative to conceptual number on number agreement in pronouns is a function of the accessibility of grammatical number and thus decreases with increasing distance between referent and anaphoric pronoun. For the production and comprehension of pronouns referring to collective nouns in German, grammatical number agreement was preferred when the pronoun was in an adjacent sentence compared with the condition in which a sentence intervened between collective noun and anaphoric pronoun. The results are interpreted as reflecting the availability of grammatical and conceptual information in short-term memory.