{"pk":26264,"title":"Singular Interpretations Linger During the Processing of Plural Noun Phrases","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, whichsuggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more thanone” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalarimplicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence usinga picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participantswere equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as apicture of multiple objects after reading a sentence containing aplural. This suggests that comprehenders activate both a semantic(i.e., singular) and a pragmatic interpretation (i.e., plural). Thecurrent study found that even after a 1500 ms delay,comprehenders still maintain activation of both meanings afterreading a sentence containing a plural. This suggests that theactivation of the singular meaning may not be due to theprocessing of a scalar implicature, but rather may be due to thenature of plural conceptual representations","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"plurals; semantics; pragmatics; scalarimplicature; language comprehension; conceptualrepresentations"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3x58z164","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Nikole","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Patson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Mount Vernon Avenue","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26264/galley/15900/download/"}]}