The Memory of Work and Error Detection of Verb Agreement: A Study with Beginners and Experts

The revision of verbal agreement is an activity requiring at first "to detect" an error or a risk of error, before operating possible modifications. Two procedures of detection are differentiated (Largy & Dedeyan, 2002): an algorithmic novice procedure & an automatized expert procedure based on the treatment of co-occurrences between inflectional morphemes (e.g., case of two successive words respectively inflected by -s & -nt). The first seems sensitive to semantic constraints, such as the plausibility between the local noun & the verb (Largy, Dedeyan & Hupet, 2004); by contrast, the second is influenced by factors of surface perception, such as the writing font (i.e., bold, degraded, Dedeyan & Largy, submitted) of the marks of the local noun & the verb. To test the hypothesis according to which these factors are of visual nature, this research studies the impact of the visuo-spatial sketchpad (Baddeley, 1986, 1992, 2003) on the novice & expert detection. To do it, children, teenagers & adults have to detect verbal agreement errors within sentences "Noun1 Noun2 Verb" of which half contain a proximity concord (e.g., The dog of the neighbors arrive), simultaneously in a secondary task implying the visuo-spatial sketch pad. The results show differentiated profiles according to the level of expertise. It indeed seems that the experts make more errors relative to the secondary task than the novices. The expert detection thus seems to lean on visual cues. Tables, Figures, References. Adapted from the source document