Abstract
The nature of semantic representations of plural nouns has been a subject of debates in the literature. The present research investigated the extent to which there are differences in the processing of plural versus single noun descriptions (e.g., the large chairs vs. the large chair). In two reading experiments, we tested whether plural (versus singular) nouns appearing in sentences were more difficult to process initially and/or led to increased processing difficulty when occurring in sentences that contain a temporary syntactic ambiguity. Reading time on syntactically ambiguous sentences containing plural or singular nouns were compared with reading time on unambiguous control sentences. The results of both experiments demonstrated significant effects of sentence ambiguity. No effects or interactions involving noun number were observed, indicating that the complexity of plural nouns does not result in processing difficulty during sentence comprehension.
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Highlights
Theoretical Background Over the last fifty years, numerous studies have identified sources of processing difficulty in a variety of tasks involving reading comprehension (See Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, & Clifton, 2011 for review)
Participants’ accuracy for comprehension questions for Experiment 1 was 95%, indicating that they complied with the instructions of the reading task
Prior research conducted using lexical decision tasks, in which plural and singular nouns were processed individually, demonstrated that plural nouns took longer to process than singular nouns
Summary
Theoretical Background Over the last fifty years, numerous studies have identified sources of processing difficulty in a variety of tasks involving reading comprehension (See Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, & Clifton, 2011 for review). There have been numerous studies comparing the processing of plural and singular nouns (See Patson, 2014, for review) Some of these studies have investigated the processing of single words using the lexical decision task during which participants were asked to judge whether a letter sequence was word or not. Ferreira and McClure (1997) showed that readers rapidly utilize information about the plural status of nouns during sentence processing. In the study, they compared reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity. Reciprocal verb conditions (i.e., 1a and b) were compared to conditions in which sentences contained an optionally transitive verb (i.e., 1c and 1d)
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