The effect of gestures on the interpretation of plural references

Abstract

During language comprehension, comprehenders build conceptual models of linguistic content. Despite their fundamental nature, relatively little is known about how plural expressions are realised in conceptual models. Specifically, it is unknown whether these models contain quantity information when it is left unspecified in the noun phrase. This paper reports two studies that investigate the effect of gestures on plural conceptual representations. Experiment 1 confirmed that small gestures evoke small set sizes and large gestures evoke large set sizes. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and showed that gestures seem to influence comprehenders' representations of number information rather than the amount of space a plural reference occupies. Taken together, these data suggest that when plurals are instantiated in comprehenders' minds, spatial information provided by gestures is used by comprehenders to make inferences about the quantity of objects in a plural set.