Vigliocco, G., Butterworth, B., and Garrett, M. F. (1996). Subject-verb correspondence in Spanish and English: differences in the role of conceptual limitations. Cognition 61, 261-298. doi: 10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00713-5 ERPs at the adjective position have shown that violations of conformity in the context of a human speaker (HV) have, unlike their acceptable counterparts (HA), caused a negative effect and a late positivity effect. The effect of negativity was significant in a wide period from 300 ms to about 700 ms after the beginning of the adjective. Such an effect did not occur under the conditions applicable to non-human offences (TNN). Based on the latency and topographic distribution of these effects, we interpret negativity as an instance of an N400 effect and late positivity as an instance of a P600 effect.

We assume that violations of FA should not be tolerated because of the relative importance of humanity in the system of agreement of standard Arabic and spoken Arabic varieties. The parser must detect the gap between the sex and the numerical mismatch between the human noun and the adjective, and there should be a negatee effect (most likely N400). We also expect da offenses to be amnested by the Parser due to variations in the spoken Arabic agreement system, where FA is a frequent option used with non-human controllers. Therefore, there should be less negativeity, if any negativity, in the case of an AD infringement compared to AF infringements. Finally, in case of infringement of AF, although they are not tolerated, there should be an attempt to tolerate them due to the prevalence of many non-beings and therefore AD in the language. It follows that in the event of a breach of the AGREEMENT, the Parser should attempt a reading of AD that results in a simultaneous delay in activating the dispute repair and/or monitoring processes, which have been briefly mentioned above (van de Meerendonk et al., 2009). It remains to be seen if this will be reflected in the P600 latency. The converging evidence for such an interpretation based on treatment complexity comes from a Hindi compliance study with Animacy by Bhattamishra, Muralikrishnan and Choudhary (presented), which also report late negativity similar to that which we found in our study.

Bornkessel-Schlesewsky & Schlesewsky (2019) also argues in a recent paper in favor of a neurobiologically plausible model, in which they postulate that all vocal negativities form a family of functional and unmarked negativities and that their different latencies reflect the degree of complexity associated with stimulus processing. Fayol, M., Largy, P., and Lemaire, P. (1994). When cognitive overload accentuates subject-verb conformity errors: a study in French written language. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 47, 437-464 doi: 10.1080/14640749408401119 Our results clearly illustrate the central role of Animacy/Humanness in grammatical convergence in Arabic. Animacy has proven to be very revealing in typologically varied languages such as Mandarin Chinese (Philipp, Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Bisang & Schlesewsky, 2008), Polish (Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2011, 2013) and Tamil (Muralikrishnan, Schlesewsky & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2015).

It is therefore not surprising that the animacy hierarchy is human (Comrie, 1989); Silverstein, 1976) is a very striking feature of Arabic that interagulates with plurality and sex. Remember that High Arabic requires that non-human masculine plural nouns (animate and inanimate) be treated as the 3rd singular feminine nouns, with respect to conformity, so that the canonical rule (number and similarity of the sexual characteristic between the adjective and the noun) would constitute a violation. In contrast, masculine plural nouns require the canonical scheme of conformity (i.e. the complete conformity of characteristics). The result is an overall distribution in High Arabic, where da (the exception) is as good and frequent as (if not more than) canonical agreement (i.e. FA), because animated and inanimate non-human speakers go beyond human references in the language. . . .