From “some butter” to “a butter”: An investigation of mass and count representation and processing

Abstract

This paper investigates the representation of mass and count nouns at the lexical–syntactic level, an issue that has not been addressed to date in psycholinguistic theories. A single case study is reported of a man with aphasia, R.A.P., who showed a countability specific deficit that affected processing of mass noun grammar. R.A.P. frequently substituted mass noun determiners (e.g., some, much) with count noun determiners (e.g., a, many). Experimental investigations determined that R.A.P. had a modality-neutral lexical–syntactic impairment.

Furthermore, a series of novel experiments revealed that R.A.P.'s processing of mass noun determiners varied depending on how mass nouns were depicted (single vs. multiple depictions) and how congruent these were with the conceptual–semantic information of target determiners (e.g., “some” corresponds to MULTIPLE but not SINGLE concepts). R.A.P.'s determiner difficulties emerged only when mass nouns and determiners were number incongruent.

The results of this research clearly indicate that nouns are lexical–syntactically specified for countability, but that the derivation of countability can additionally be influenced by conceptual-semantics.

Keywords:

• Mass/count representation
• Lexical–syntactic impairment
• Aphasia.

We would like to thank Naama Friedmann for helpful discussion.

During the preparation of this paper, Nora Fieder was funded by a Macquarie University Research Excellence (MQRES) scholarship, Lyndsey Nickels was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship, and Britta Biedermann by an ARC Australian Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes

¹ In a published conference abstract, Semenza, Mondini, and Marinelli (2000) reported the case of C.N., a woman with fluent aphasia who showed a relative deficit in naming bare count nouns compared to mass nouns. C.N.’s count noun specific problem was accounted for by an impairment of word form retrieval while no difference between mass and count nouns was found in semantic and grammatical tasks. However, it showed that the difference in performance across mass and count conditions was very small and only reached significance when it was summed over three occasions; consequently we do not address this case in detail here.

² Phonological errors include phonologically related words, phonological nonwords, and false starts (target: flag; response: f . . . f . . . flag).

³ Singular count nouns and mass nouns are matched for visual complexity in both item sets. Plural count nouns could not be matched with singular count nouns and mass nouns for visual complexity as the former were presented as multiple objects and the latter as single objects.

⁴ We did not collect control data for written picture naming as we expected similar results for written and spoken picture naming in healthy adults (Bonin, Chalard, Méot, & Fayol, 2002). As controls were close to ceiling on bare noun picture naming we did not collect control data for cued picture naming.

⁵ When the control group performs at or close to ceiling, we cannot be absolutely sure that there is no difference in performance across mass and count conditions: Any effects could be obscured by ceiling effects (for further discussion see Best, Schröder, & Herbert, 2006).

⁶ Noun phrases with the determiners “many” and “much” had to be negated to sound grammatically acceptable.

⁷ For discussion of determiner competition in noun phrase production, see, for example (Schiller & Caramazza, 2003).

⁸ Response set was originally used to refer to eligible responses in Stroop tasks. For example, the ink colours blue and yellow may be included in the task but not red and green: Blue and yellow therefore comprise the response set. Distractors that were members of a response set have been found to cause more interference than distractors that were not part of the response set (e.g., participants were slower in naming the colour of the word BLUE in yellow ink than of the word RED in yellow ink; Lamers, Roelofs, & Rabeling-Keus, 2010).

⁹ Celex has 31,549 count noun entries and 13,135 mass (uncountable) noun entries when taking only head nouns into account (e.g., singular noun forms, but not the plural noun forms).