Mijin Kang and Jungok Bae. 2017. Errors in Subject-Verb Agreement: The Case of Immersion-Based EFL Elementary School Students. Studies in Modern Grammar 95, 81-101. The present study investigates several syntactic structures in which subject-verb agreement errors occur. The study analyzed free writing samples written by 104 elementary school students enrolled in a partial English immersion school. In the writing samples, errors in the subject-verb agreement were found in the following categories: (a) subject + verb; (b) coordinated subjects + verb; (c) subject + coordinated verbs; and (d) expletive ‘there’ + ‘be’ verb. Errors in the ‘subject + verb’ structure with no modifying phrases in-between were the most prominent. The second most frequent errors were found in the ‘subject + coordinated verbs’ structure. The results provide useful implications for English teachers dealing with the persistent errors in the subject-verb agreement.

According to the Simple Descriptive Rule of subject- verb agreement, the process of that in English can be described as singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs. Although this descriptive rule for subject-verb agreement looks simple, there are several prescriptive rules for the agreement such as form-based traditional rules, meaning-based principle of notional concord, principle of proximity, attraction, and other mechanical rules. Among them, the phenomenon of attraction denotes that when subject has the complex noun phrases, the verb tends to agree with another noun in its vicinity. The current study aims to examine the tendency of attraction with Korean learners of English; to investigate how this mechanism facilitates speakers' resolution of number mismatches and their number agreement processing during sentence production.