Singular Interpretations Linger During the Processing of Plural Noun Phrases

Plural nouns do not strictly refer to more than one object, which suggests that they are not semantically marked to mean “more than one” and that plurality inferences are made via a scalar implicature. Consistent with that hypothesis, recent evidence using a picture-matching paradigm supports founds that participants were equally fast to respond to a picture of a single object as a picture of multiple objects after reading a sentence containing a plural. This suggests that comprehenders activate both a semantic (i.e., singular) and a pragmatic interpretation (i.e., plural). The current study found that even after a 1500 ms delay, comprehenders still maintain activation of both meanings after reading a sentence containing a plural. This suggests that the activation of the singular meaning may not be due to the processing of a scalar implicature, but rather may be due to the nature of plural conceptual representations.