How quantifiers influence the conceptual representation of plurals

This paper reports the results of two experiments that investigate the nature of plural conceptual representations that are created during sentence comprehension. Previous work has found that comprehenders seem to represent both a singular object and a plural set of objects during the comprehension of plural nouns. The activation of the singular object has been attributed to the pragmatic processing involved in understanding the plural (Patson, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42, 1140–1153, 2016a). The goal of the current study was to further investigate this hypothesis. Experiment 1 used a picture-matching paradigm to investigate how comprehenders conceptualize plural nouns quantified with many, which renders the scalar implicature unnecessary. Consistent with the pragmatic processing hypothesis, comprehenders did not activate a singular form when the plural was quantified with many. Experiment 2 was designed to further investigate whether all quantifiers block activation of the singular form. The same picture-matching paradigm was used with numerical quantifiers that specify numbers either within or above the subitization range. When the number was within the subitization range, comprehenders’ conceptual representations contained exactly that number of objects, and importantly did not contain a singular object. When number was above the subitization range, comprehenders’ conceptual representations did not contain an exact number of objects and seemed to activate a singular object. These data are consistent with constraints on how many objects can be represented in visual working memory. Taken together, the results of these two experiments suggest that the plural’s conceptual representation emerged as a result of grammatical processing as well as limits on the visual processing system.