Humans can communicate information on numerosity by means of number words (e.g. one hundred, a couple), but also through Number morphology (e.g. through the singular vs. the plural forms of a noun). Agreement violations involving Number morphology (e.g. *one apples) are well known to elicit specific ERP components such as the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN); yet, the relationship between a morphological Number value (e.g. singular vs. plural) and its referential numerosity has been scantly considered in the literature. Moreover, even if agreement violations have been proved very useful, they do not typically characterise the everyday language usage, thus narrowing the scope of the results. In this study we investigated Number morphology from a different perspective, by focusing on the ERP correlates of congruence and incongruence between a depicted numerosity and noun phrases. To this aim we designed a picture-phrase matching paradigm in Italian. In each trial, a picture depicting one or four objects was followed by a grammatical phrase made up of a quantifier and a content noun inflected either in the singular or in the plural. When analysing ERP time-locked to the content noun, plural phrases after pictures presenting one object elicited a larger negativity, similar to a LAN effect. No significant congruence effect was found in the case of the phrases whose morphological Number value conveyed a numerosity of one. Considering the LAN as an index of morpho-syntactic incongruence, these results suggest that 1) LAN-like effects can be triggered independently from the grammaticality of the utterances and irrespective the P600 component; 2) the reference to a numerosity can be partially encoded in an incremental way when processing Number morphology; and, most importantly, 3) the processing of the morphological Number value of plural is different from that of singular as the former shows a narrower interpretability than the latter.

In a recent article, Everett (2019) proposed a culture-centered account of the distribution of the observed values for an almost universal grammatical feature,

Is the mass-count distinction merely a linguistic issue, or is it coded in representations other than language? We hypothesized that a difference between mass and count properties should be observed even in absence of linguistic distinctions driven by the morphosyntactic context. We tested 5-6-year-old children's ability to judge sentences with mass nouns (sand), count nouns (ring), and neutral nouns (i.e., those that appear in mass and count contexts with similar frequency; cake). Children refused neutral nouns embedded in uncountable morphosyntactic contexts, showing a preference for a count interpretation. This suggests that linguistic features alone are not sufficient to define the mass-count distinction. Additional analyses showed that children's performance with mass-but not count-morphosyntax correlated with their performance in tasks concerning logical and conservation operations. Altogether, these results suggest that the processing of mass features is not more demanding than count features from a linguistic point of view; rather, mass features entail additional abstraction abilities.Keywords Count/mass distinction . Language acquisition . Morphological number . Conservation operations . CountabilityTraditional grammar descriptions (after Cheng, 1973) trace a division between mass and count nouns. Specifically, mass nouns refer to substances (e.g., sand), a n d c o u n t n o u n s r e f e r t o o b j ec t s ( e . g . , r i n g ) . Morphosyntactic properties are crucial to distinguish between these two categories of nouns: Mass nouns do not take the plural (e.g., sands) and in the singular form cannot be modified by some determiners (e.g., a sand, each sand). Count nouns do have a plural form (e.g., rings) and in the singular form can be modified by those determiners (e.g., a ring, each ring).Even though the properties that distinguish mass from count nouns have been debated for a long time, both by philosophers (e.g., Pelletier, 1975Pelletier, , 2012Quine, 1960) and linguists (e.g., Allan, 1980;Bale & Barner, 2009;Gillon, 1992;Jackendoff, 1991), influential linguistic approaches (e.g., Borer, 2005;Chierchia, 1998Chierchia, , 2010De Belder, 2011) agree that m ass nouns (or mass morphosyntax) are formally simpler than count nouns (or count morphosyntax). The argument is that the computation of these latter requires more operations at the morphosyntactic level or at the semantic level. In fact, mass nouns can appear only in the singular (e.g., sand) while count nouns display a full inflection for number morphology (e.g., ring vs. rings). Even in the philosophical perspective advanced by Quine (1960), the mass interpretation would be the basic one from which the count interpretation derives.However, as already observed in many theoretical works (e.g., Allan, 1980;Pelletier, 2012;Rothstein, 2010), the simplicity of mass nouns as compared to count nouns in linguistics does not seem as straightforward in terms of cognition. The assumption that mass nouns (or mass morphosyntax) are formally simpler t...

Number morphology (e.g., singular vs. plural) is a part of the grammar that captures numerical information. Some languages have morphological Number values, which express few (paucal), two (dual), three (trial) and sometimes (possibly) four (quadral). Interestingly, the limit of the attested morphological Number values matches the limit of non‐verbal numerical cognition. The latter is based on two systems, one estimating approximate numerosities and the other computing exact numerosities up to three or four. We compared the literature on non‐verbal number systems with data on Number morphology from 218 languages. Our observations suggest that non‐verbal numerical cognition is reflected as a core part of language.

Language encodes into morphology part of the information present in the referential world. Some features are marked in the great majority of languages, such as the numerosity of the referents that is encoded in morphological Number. Other features do not surface as frequently in morphological markings, yet they are pervasive in natural languages. This is the case of animacy, that can ground Gender systems as well as constrain the surfacing of Number. The diffusion of numerosity and animacy could mirror their biological salience at the extra-linguistic cognitive level. Human extra-linguistic numerical abilities are phylogenetically ancient and are observed in non-human animal species, especially when counting salient animate entities such as social companions. Does the saliency of animacy influence the morphological encoding of Number in language processing? We designed an experiment to test the encoding of morphological Number in language processing in relation to animacy. In Italian, Gender and Number are mandatorily expressed in a fusional morpheme. In some nouns denoting animate referents, Gender encodes the sex of referents and is semantically interpretable. In some other animate nouns and in inanimate nouns, Gender is uninterpretable at the semantic level. We found that it is easier to inflect for Number nouns when the inflectional morpheme is interpretable with respect to a semantic feature related to animacy. We discuss the possibility that the primacy of animacy in counting is mirrored in morphological processing and that morphology is designed to easily express information that is salient from a cognitive point of view.

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Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing. Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural. Experimental research reports higher processing costs in the presence of a non-transparent relation between forms and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the transparency degree of the inflected forms. Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the transparency in inflection with regard to the declensional classes and the extent to which it is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives). We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, and quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical research.