The mental representation of plural events

Event-Predictive Cognition: Underspecification and Interaction With Language

Warren and Dresang comment on the contributions from a psycholinguistic perspective, highlighting close relations between the respective research on events and proposing that, for example, verbs may indeed directly pre‐activate templates of the typically involved event participants.

Conceptual Factors Influence Children's Distributivity Bias

Sentences such as "The girls read a book" can lead to multiple interpretations: They could be reading the same book (collective) or they could each be reading their own book (distributive). In ambiguous contexts, adults prefer the collective interpretation, and preschool children show a slight bias for a distributive interpretation. The current research investigated whether conceptual factors (number of actors) influences interpretations of these kinds of predicates. The data with children show a stronger collective bias when there are four actors compared to two actors. This may be because children are more likely to conceptualize groups of four (vs. two) as sets rather than collections of individuals. These data are discussed with reference to research on visual and conceptual integration abilities, showing that children lag behind in their ability to combine components into a whole in comparison to parsing objects into their component parts.

Misinterpretations in agreement and agreement attraction

It has been well established that subject–verb number agreement can be disrupted by local noun phrases that differ in number from the subject head noun phrase. In sentence production, mismatches in the grammatical number of the head and local noun phrases lead to agreement errors on the verb as in: the key to the cabinets are. Similarly, although ungrammaticality typically causes disruption in measures of sentence comprehension, the disruption is reduced when the local noun phrase has a plural feature. Using a forced-choice comprehension question method, we report two experiments that provide evidence that comprehenders were likely to misinterpret the number information on the head noun phrase when morphosyntactic number markings on the local noun phrase and verb did not match the head. These results are consistent with a growing body of research that suggests that comprehenders often arrive at a final interpretation of a sentence that is not faithful to the linguistic input.