Computation of semantic number from morphological information☆

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Abstract

The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological properties of visually presented words. In a Stroop-like task, Hebrew speakers were asked to determine the number of words presented on a computer screen (one or two) while ignoring their contents. People took longer to respond if the number of words was incongruent with their morphological number (e.g., they were slower to determine that one word was on the screen if it was plural, and in some conditions, that two words were on the screen if they were singular, compared to neutral letter strings), suggesting that the extraction of number from words is automatic and yields a representation comparable to the one computed by the perceptual system. In many conditions, the effect of number congruency occurred only with plural nouns, not singulars, consistent with the suggestion from linguistics that words lacking a plural affix are not actually singular in their semantics but unmarked for number.

Section snippets

Experiment 1

Experiment 1 examines the extraction of semantic number from morphological marking by comparing singular (e.g., dog) and plural (e.g., dogs) nouns. It also investigated whether the extraction of number depends on the regularity of the inflectional paradigm and the familiarity of the plural form (see Table 2). These manipulations depend on properties of Hebrew nominal inflection, which generates plurals by concatenating a suffix to the singular base. The choice of suffix depends on the gender of

Experiment 2

Though singular nouns did not interfere with the detection of multiple strings in Experiment 1, one might worry whether this insensitivity merely reflects some feature of the experimental method that prevents people from registering the singular number of a singular noun because of the particular task demands. Alternatively, it is possible that singularity is encoded, but it fails to interfere with responses to two strings because people encode the conjunction of two singular nouns (e.g., dog,

Experiment 3

The findings of Experiment 1 suggest that by default, people extract semantic number for plurals but not singulars. The fact that the extraction of semantic number was insensitive to lexical information (i.e., the regularity of the base and the familiarity with the plural form) further suggests that ordinarily, semantic number is automatically computed from morphological information alone.

Experiment 3 explores this possibility further by investigating the perception of numerosity when no

General discussion

The findings of Experiments 1–3 demonstrate that readers extract the semantic number of bare nouns automatically and represent it in a way that is comparable to the conceptual number that they extract from visual perception. Because these effects of number congruency were observed when lexical semantic features are absent (for nonwords, used in Experiment 3), these results demonstrate that semantic number can be extracted via grammatical knowledge from morphological marking alone. The

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    ☆

    This research was supported by NIH Grants R29 DC03277 and HD 18381. We thank Grev Corbett for discussion of this project.

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