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The mental representation of plural events
Nikole D Patson1, Tessa Warren
1a Department of Psychology , The Ohio State University , Marion , OH , USA.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|October 23, 2014
Summary
Comprehenders often leave mental representations of plural events underspecified, similar to plural noun phrases. However, explicit cues trigger incremental and explicit mental representation of event number.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Research indicates comprehenders represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as underspecified sets without strong individuation cues.
- This study extends the investigation to understand the mental representation of plural events in language comprehension.
Purpose of the Study:
- To determine if plural events, like plural NPs, are mentally represented as underspecified.
- To investigate the conditions under which event plurality is explicitly represented during comprehension.
Main Methods:
- Utilized aspectual coercion manipulations and a number-of-words judgment task.
- Employed distributive quantifiers and inherently distributed verbs with varying subject types (conjoined NPs vs. plural definite descriptions).
Main Results:
- Evidence suggests event plurality can be indexed similarly to NP plurality.
- Comprehenders incrementally represent predicate plurality at the verb.
- Inherent verb distributivity alone does not guarantee multiple event representation; subject type is crucial.
Conclusions:
- Plural events are generally left underspecified without strong individuation cues.
- Disambiguating information enables explicit and incremental mental representation of event number.
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