Sign languages are frequently described as having three verb classes. One, \'agreeing\' verbs, indicates the person/number of its subject and object by modification of the beginning and ending locations of the verb. The second, \'spatial\' verbs, makes a similar appearing modification of verb movement to represent the source and goal locations of the theme of a verb of motion. The third class, \'plain\' verbs, is characterized as having neither of these types of modulations. A number of researchers have proposed accounts that collapse all of these types, or the person-agreeing and spatial verbs. Here we present evidence from late learners of American Sign Language and from the emergence of new sign languages that person agreement and locative agreement have a different status in these conditions, and we claim their analysis should be kept distinct, at least in certain ways.

Verb agreement in signed languages has received substantial attention for a long time. Despite the numerous analyses about the linguistic status of verb agreement, there is little discussion about the argument structure associated with \"directional verbs,\" also known as agreeing/agreement or indicating verbs. This paper proposes a usage-based approach for analyzing argument structure constructions of directional verbs in American Sign Language (ASL). The proposal offers low-level constructions for reported speech, non-dedicated passive and reflexive, and stance verb constructions, which capture the patterns, abstracted from recurring usage events, that are part of users\' linguistic knowledge. The approach has potential to push the field of sign linguistics in new directions of understanding the interplay of language use and structure.

Successful subject-verb agreement production requires retrieving the verbal forms that agree with the features of the subject head noun and not of other nouns in the sentence. We investigate, for the first time, the electrophysiological indexes of number attraction and word order during agreement production. Twenty-four Basque native speakers were tested while producing auxiliary verbs during sentence completion of transitive sentence preambles involving singular subjects and singular or plural objects in canonical (SOV) and non-canonical (OSV) structures. ERP results yielded a larger production P2 (pP2) amplitude for mismatching than matching objects in SOV sentences, and larger negativity for OSV than SOV in number matching condition. We explain these results in terms of distinct contributions of number and word order during correct agreement production, with the pP2 indexing morphosyntactic retrieval difficulty of agreement-inflection, and the frontal negativity reflecting word order effects during monitoring the correctness of the selected verbal form.

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being subject to grammatical constraints, and marking the kinds of grammatical distinctions expected of pronouns. We conclude that first-person points meet all these proposed criteria, but that nonfirst person points are in part gestural. Lastly, we review evidence for the grammaticization over time of systems of pointing signs within signed languages.

Third and 5th grade Hebrew-speaking children performed two sentence completion tasks, one requiring the assignment of male, female, or gender-ambiguous names and the inflection of verbs for male-stereotyped, female-stereotyped, and gender-neutral activities, and the other task, of inflecting verbs for male- and female-stereotyped activities performed by children with gender-ambiguous names. The question of concern was whether when faced with the need to inflect verbs to match the conceptual gender of the sentence subject, the gender-stereotyped nature of the activities in question and children\'s own gender would play a role in resolving the dilemma created by gender-ambiguous names and contexts. In both parts of the study, we found that (1) children\'s own gender played a role in determining the pattern of verb inflection, and (2) children used their semantic knowledge regarding the gender-stereotyped nature of activities to inflect verbs so as to create subject-verb agreement. Hence, subject-verb agreement in children draws on both their grammatical and semantic knowledge.

Proofreading text relies on stored knowledge, language processing, and attentional resources. Age differentially affects these constituent abilities: while older adults maintain word knowledge and most aspects of language comprehension, language production and attention capacity are impaired with age. Research with young adults demonstrates that proofreading is more attentionally-demanding for contextual errors which require integration across multiple words compared to noncontextual errors which occur within a single word. Proofreading is also more attentionally-demanding for text which is more difficult to comprehend compared to easier text. Older adults may therefore be impaired at aspects of proofreading which require production, contextual errors, or more difficult text. The current study tested these possibilities using a naturalistic proofreading task. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults proofread noncontextual (spelling) and contextual (grammar or meaning) errors in passages that were easier or more difficult to comprehend. Older adults were preserved at proofreading spelling errors, but were impaired relative to young adults when proofreading grammar or meaning errors, especially for difficult passages. Additionally, older adults were relatively spared at detecting errors compared to correcting spelling errors, in keeping with previous research. Age differences were not attributable to individual differences in vocabulary knowledge or self-reported spelling ability.

Children with primary language impairment (LI) show a deficit in processing different grammatical structures, verb inflections, and syntactically complex sentences among other things (Clahsen-Hansen 1997; Leonard et al. 1997). Cross-linguistic research has shown that the pattern of performance is language-specific. We examined grammatical sensitivity to word order and agreement violations in 50 Hungarian-speaking children with and without LI. The findings suggest a strong association between sensitivity to grammatical violations and working memory capacity. Variations in working memory performance predicted grammatical sensitivity. Hungarian participants with LI exhibited a weakness in detecting both agreement and word order violations.