Abstract: Number agreement has been extensively studied in many languages such as French, German and English. To date three models have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, including marking and morphing model, feature-percolation model and activation framework theory. Whether number agreement applies to Chinese remains a controversial topic. In addition, this issue has been mostly studied in the field of linguistics but not psychology.
In the present study, we aim to investigate number agreement in Chinese sentence production by looking into implicit number tendency of Chinese verbs and nouns. In experiment 1, a sentence completion task was used to explore the implicit number tendency of verbs to identify if verb-pronoun number agreement exists in Chinese sentence production. A 2 × 2 repeated measure design was adopted with independent variables of implicit number tendency of verbs (singular/plural) and verb-pronoun number agreement (agreement/violation). The results showed that the effect of verb-pronoun number agreement is significant but neither the effect of implicit number tendency of verbs nor the interaction between the two variables is significant, indicating that verb-pronoun number agreement plays an important role in Chinese sentence production.
Experiment 2 aimed to probe noun-pronoun number agreement in Chinese sentence production with similar study designs. The results showed that similar to experiment 1, the effect of noun-pronoun number agreement is significant but the effect of implicit number tendency of nouns and the interaction between the two variables were not significant.
Experiment 3 sought to investigate whether there was attraction, a special number agreement phenomenon, in Chinese sentence production. A 2 × 2 within-subject design was used with variables as number agreement between head nouns and local nouns and head nouns’ implicit number tendency. The results showed that the effect of number agreement between subject nouns and object nouns is significant whereas the effect of subject noun’s implicit number tendency and the interaction between the two variables were non-significant. The current findings indicate that object noun’s number tendency can interfere with the subject noun’s number processing, but different from English, attraction phenomenon in Chinese is symmetrical.
To sum up, number agreement phenomenon does exist in Chinese sentence production and verbs or nouns’ implicit number tendency can affect the choice of pronouns (sentence subjects). Attraction of number agreement also exists in Chinese sentence production but is symmetrical as opposed to that of English. The present study to some extent provides further evidence to support the feature-percolation model and activation frame theory of number agreement.

Key words: subject-verb agreement, antecedent noun-pronoun agreement, attraction