The acceptability of person and number agreement/disagreement in Italian: an experimental study

In this study we compared subject-verb agreement contrasting person and number features in Italian: The design included local agreement dependencies in which 1st and 2nd person vs 3rd person subjects could match or mismatch in number with the predicate giving rise to, respectively, grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. We observed that while acceptability perception in the mismatching condition does not differ substantially across person and number values, in matching conditions (grammatical number matching), third person singular is the configuration producing higher acceptability scores. This supports the default nature of 3rd person and singular features. Also a position effect is revealed in this study, suggesting that the later the matrix subject-verb agreement appears in a grammatical sentence, the lower is the acceptability rate given to that sentence.