Stroop-like interference of grammatical and visual number Experimental evidence from Polish speakers

The current paper presents results of two experiments attempting to replicate with Polish speakers a Stroop-like interference of grammatical number with the counting task, first reported by Berent et al. (2005) for Hebrew. Both experiments tested the influence of the type of number morphology (marked with overt suffix vs. unmarked) of nouns on the strength of the interference effect. Additionally, the second experiment investigated the processing of nouns with a mismatch between grammatical and conceptual number and tested the possible effect of animacy on number interpretation in order to determine the time at which the information about grammatical number is activated. The first experiment showed a significant interaction between the grammatical number and visual numerosity of the counted words and the effect of markedness, with marked singulars producing a bigger congruency effect than unmarked singulars. However, in the second experiment the influence of morphology was reversed and the overall effects were considerably weaker.