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Children’S Insensitivity To Information From The Target Of Agreement: The Case Of Xhosa, Sandile Gxilishe, Mantoa Rose Smouse, Thabisa Xhalisa, Jill De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

The paper presents an account of number agreement phenomena arguing that the target of agreement may be bleached of number information. This would explain why English-speaking children have difficulty relying on the target alone as a clue to number, despite producing it correctly. Xhosa has a very rich subject-verb agreement system and pro-drop, and there is theoretical dispute over its properties. An experiment with Xhosa-speaking children revealed that they, too, are unable to use the morpheme on the verb as a cue to subject number. It is argued that this may be further evidence that the morpheme is agreement rather …