The mental representation of plural events. Issue 7 (July 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Patson, Nikole D.; Warren, Tessa
• Is Part Of: Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. Volume 68:Issue 7(2015)
• Page Start: 1249
• Page End: 1267
• Publication Date: 2015-07
• Subjects: Plurals -- Distributivity -- Aspectual coercion -- Events -- Semantic representations -- Underspecification; Psychology, Experimental -- Periodicals; Psychophysiology -- Periodicals; Psychology, Comparative -- Periodicals; 150.72405
• DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.976578
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1747-0218

Abstract

A growing body of work suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, comprehenders leave their mental representations of plural entities underspecified—that is, they mentally represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as groups or nondifferentiated sets. The current paper investigates whether this also holds for plural events. Experiments 1a–1b used an aspectual coercion manipulation to provide evidence that event plurality can be indexed by the number-of-words judgement task that Patson and Warren [2010. Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 782–789] used to investigate the mental representation of plural nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed this by showing that comprehenders mentally represent predicates associated with distributive quantifiers as plural, and they do so immediately at the verb rather than waiting until the completion of the predicate. Experiment 3 probed inherently distributed verbs and showed that inherent distributivity is not enough to push comprehenders to mentally represent multiple events. Only when the subject of an inherently distributed verb is a conjoined NP, rather than a plural definite description, do comprehenders mentally represent multiple events. Experiment 4 replicated and extended Experiment 3. This body of findings suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, plural events are left underspecified. However, when disambiguating information is provided, comprehenders do mentally represent number information explicitly and incrementally.