The conceptual representation of number

Abstract

The experiments reported here investigated the format of plural conceptual representations using a picture-matching paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences that ended with a singular noun phrase (NP), a two-quantified plural NP, or a plural definite description [The parents handed the child the (two) crayon/s] and then saw a picture of one or multiple referents for the NP. Judgement times to confirm that there was overlap between the pictured object(s) and a noun in the sentence showed an interaction between the NP's number and NP–picture match. For singular NPs and two-quantified NPs, participants were reliably faster to respond “yes” to a picture that had the exact number of objects specified by the NP, but for plural definite descriptions, the effect of the number of pictured items was not reliable. Experiment 2 extended this finding to conceptual plurals. Participants read sentences biased toward either a collective (Together the men carried a box—box is interpreted as singular) or distributed (Each of the men carried a box—box is likely interpreted as plural) reading. Experiment 2 showed the same interaction between NP conceptual plurality and NP–picture match as that in Experiment 1. These results suggest that: (a) our default conceptual representations for plural definite descriptions are no more similar to images of small sets of multiple items than to images of singular items; and (b) the difference between singular and plural conceptual representations is unlikely to be simply the presence or absence of a plural feature. The results are consistent with theories in which plurality is unmarked, such that some plural NPs can refer to singular referents [e.g., Sauerland, U., Anderssen, J., & Yatsushiro, J. (2005). The plural is semantically unmarked. In S. Kepser & M. Reis (Eds.), Linguistic evidence (pp. 413–434). Berlin: de Gruyter].

Keywords:

• Conceptual representations
• Language comprehension
• Number
• Plurals
• Semantics

Financial support from the University of Pittsburgh Honors College and advice from Michael Walsh Dickey, William Horton, Natasha Tokowicz, and Mandy Simons are gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank Chelsea Mafrica, Michele Miklos, Amanda Ward, Emily Harbolt, Sam Ludwig, and Hannah Russell for assistance collecting data. We would like to thank members of the Pitt/CMU semantics/pragmatics/sentence processing group and the audiences at Psychonomics 2011 and CUNY 2012 for helpful comments.

Notes

¹ Note that although we refer to separate referential and conceptual representations, the arguments in this paper still hold if there is a single (conceptual) representation, and referential processing is accomplished by routines that are only sensitive to certain features of that representation.