Successful written subject verb agreement: an online analysis of the procedure used by students in Grades 3, 5 and 12

This study was designed to (1) investigate the procedure responsible forsuccessful written subject–verb agreement, and (2) describe how it develops acrossgrades. Students in Grades 3, 5 and 12 were asked to read noun–noun–verb sen-tences aloud (e.g., Le chien des voisins mange [The dog of the neighbors eats]) andwrite out the verb inflections. Some of the nouns differed in number, thus inducingattraction errors. Results showed that third graders were successful because theyimplemented a declarative procedure requiring regressive fixations on the subjectnoun while writing out the inflection. A dual-step procedure (Hupet, Schelstraete,Demaeght, & Fayol, 1996) emerged in Grade 5, and was fully efficient by Grade 12.This procedure, which couples an automatized agreement rule with a monitoringprocess operated within working memory (without the need for regressive fixa-tions), was found to trigger a mismatch asymmetry (singular–plural [ plural–sin-gular) in Grade 5. The time course of written subject–verb agreement, the origin of agreement errors and differences between the spoken and written modalities are discussed.