Psycholinguistic Investigation of the Immediate Interpretation of Plural Nouns in the Scope of Sentential Negation in Polish

Abstract

The number meaning of grammatically plural nouns is to some extent context sensitive. In negative sentences, plural nouns typically receive an inclusive reading referring to any number of individuals (one or many). This contrasts with their more frequent exclusive reading referring to a group of two or more individuals. The present study investigated whether a plural noun in a negative sentence is treated as inclusive immediately when it is encountered or whether this interpretation is delayed. In an experiment using a technique based on a numerical variant of the Stroop effect (Berent et al. in J Mem Lang 53:342–358, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2005.05.002; Patson and Warren in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 36(3):782–789, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018783), participants counted visually presented singular and plural Polish nouns embedded in either affirmative or negative sentences. The nouns were displayed once or as two copies. Plural nouns were easier to count when they were repeated twice on the screen than when only one copy was displayed. For singular nouns this pattern was reversed and the effect was weaker. Crucially, no difference was found for plural nouns appearing in affirmative and negative sentences. This indicated that an inclusive (“one or more”) reading of plural nouns in the scope of sentential negation was not immediate. The results are in line with past research suggesting that the semantic processing of a negative sentence may proceed in two phases (Fischler et al. in Psychophysiology 20(4):400–409, 1983. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8986.1983.tb00920.x; Kaup et al. in J Pragmat 38:1033–1050, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2005.09.012; Lüdtke et al. in J Cogn Neurosci 20(8):1355–1370, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2008.20093; Spychalska in Proceedings of the 2011 ESSLLI student session, 2011).