Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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