Plural dominance and the production of determiner-noun phrases in French.

Elisabeth Beyersmann,F.-Xavier Alario,Antje Lorenz,Solène Hameau,Niels O Schiller,Britta Biedermann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0200723

Abstract

In two experiments, we examined the functional locus of plural dominance in the French spoken word production system, where singulars and plurals share the same phonological word form. The materials included singular-dominant (singular more frequent than plural) and plural-dominant nouns (plural more frequent than singular). In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to produce determiner-noun phrases in response to singular and plural depictions of objects. In contrast to the dominance-by-number interaction that is typically observed in English, Dutch and German, the French picture-naming data revealed a main effect of number, but no effect of plural dominance. When participants were instructed to produce determiner-noun phrases in a reading aloud task (Experiment 2), where number is orthographically marked, a number-by-dominance interaction emerged. Our data suggest that plural dominance is encoded at the word form level within the context of recent theories of spoken word production.

Highlights

The production of plural nouns, such as tigers, is usually delayed and more error-prone compared to the production of the corresponding singular form tiger [1,2]
In the reaction time analyses, the inclusion of dominance, as well as the interaction between number and dominance did not significantly improve the model’s fit and these factors were excluded from the model
While our results suggest that the observed dominance effect in reading aloud originates at the orthographic word form level in French, they do not necessarily infer that similar principles apply to the production of plurals in other languages

Summary

Introduction

The production of plural nouns, such as tigers, is usually delayed and more error-prone compared to the production of the corresponding singular form tiger [1,2]. One explanation for this number effect is that an explicit affixation process is needed when plural targets are produced (e.g., tiger-s). As demonstrated for different Indo-European languages, the number effect in language production is strongly modulated by the relative surface frequency of the singular and corresponding plural forms (e.g., tiger vs tigers), an interaction referred to as "plural dominance" [1,2,11].

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Conclusion