One or more: psycholinguistic evidence for divergence of numerosity and grammatical number assignment

Naturalistic slips of the tongue in Finnish were studied in order to reveal the production of grammatical number. It appears that speakers may consider plural forms referring to single events as singulars and collective nouns as plurals. These result in violations in number agreement. It was found that errors in numerosity are both structural and semantic in nature and that one type can be traced to the level of morphological encoding and the other type to message formulation.