The effects of word order on subject–verb and object–verb agreement: Evidence from Basque Mikel Santesteban a,b,⇑ , Martin J. Pickering a , Holly P. Branigan a a Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom b Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain article info Article history: Received 23 June 2011 revision received 20 September 2012 Available online 23 October 2012 Keywords: Subject–verb agreement Object–verb agreement Word order Speech errors Sentence production abstract We report two experiments investigating subject–verb and object–verb agreement in Bas- que. Participants repeated and completed preambles containing singular or plural subjects and objects in sentences with canonical subject-object–verb (SOV) or non-canonical object–subject–verb (OSV) order; in Experiment 2, they did so while remembering two unrelated words. Participants were equally likely to produce erroneous plural subject agreement following singular subjects and plural object agreement following singular objects. Additionally, both subject and object errors were more common for OSV than SOV sentences. However, the increase in errors from SOV to OSV sentences was greater for object agreement than for subject agreement: Participants produced more subject than object agreement errors in SOV sentences, but more object than subject agreement errors in OSV sentences. These findings suggest agreement encoding is affected by both overall sentential word order and proximity of agreeing elements; furthermore, encoding of object agreement involves similar processes to that of subject agreement. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Speakers have to compute many operations during the production of sentences. They select words from their mental lexicon, construct syntactic dependencies that con- vey the intended message, order those words in a gram- matical sequence and retrieve their phonological content. In this paper, we are concerned with one aspect of this pro- cess: the way in which speakers compute agreement be- tween two elements of a sentence. Specifically, we ask whether agreement is affected by word order or not, and if so, whether different word orders may give rise to differ- ent patterns of erroneous agreement. In addition, we ask whether the processes underlying agreement depend on the particular type of agreement involved. To address these questions, we examined the circumstances under which Basque speakers produced agreement errors between a verb and its arguments when we manipulated the order of the arguments. Unlike previous research on agreement, our study considers agreement not only between a subject and a verb, but also between an object and a verb, both when the subject precedes the object and vice versa. During production, speakers must determine a syntactic structure for their message. One aspect of sentence struc- ture is syntactic agreement, whereby syntactic features of one element (the agreement controller) determine syntactic features of another element (the agreement target). 1 For example, in Basque, as in many other languages, the 0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.09.003 ⇑ Corresponding author at: Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea 5, Vitoria-Gasteiz 01006, Spain. Fax: +34 945013200. E-mail address: msantesteban@gmail.com (M. Santesteban). 1 Following the main psycholinguistic models of sentence production, here we account for agreement relations in terms of an agreement controller (i.e., the subject), that transmits its number features to its target (i.e., the verb). However, note that according to some constraint-based linguistic models, number features are simultaneously assigned from the conceptual level to the subject and the verb (e.g., Pollard & Sag, 1994). Such an account was also implemented in a ‘‘feature-copying and unification’’ model proposed by Vigliocco and colleagues (e.g., Vigliocco, Butterworth, & Garrett, 1996; see Bock & Middleton, 2011, for a review). Journal of Memory and Language 68 (2013) 160–179 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Memory and Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jml