Priming plural ambiguities

Sentences that involve two or more plural expressions, such as numerical expressions, give rise to systematic ambiguities. For example, the sentence Two boys have three balloons can either mean that there are two boys who, between them, have three balloons (cumulative reading) or that there are two boys who each have three balloons (distributive reading). In this paper, we report the results of three experiments which show that the distributive/cumulative ambiguity can give rise to priming effects. That is, when subjects perform a sentence-picture matching task which creates a strong bias towards one of the two types of readings, they are more likely to access the very same type of interpretation when subsequently presented with a different sentence-picture pair which does not create the same bias. This finding suggests that the abstract constructs that linguists posit to account for different types of readings describe some real features of mental representations. Introduction: plural ambiguities and priming effects Sentences that involve two or more plural expressions, such as numerical expressions, can give rise to multiple readings. For example, a sentence like (1) has at least two different readings, paraphrased in (1a) and (1b). Situations illustrating each reading are depicted in Fig. 1. (1) Two boys have three balloons. a. Cumulative reading: There are two boys who, between them, have three balloons (Fig. 1a). b. Distributive reading: Two boys have each three balloons (Fig. 1b). (a) Cumulative reading (b) Distributive reading Figure 1: Readings of sentences with plurals The multiple readings to which plural expressions give rise in natural languages have been extensively studied in theoretical linguistics. Each of the two interpretations mentioned above