From “some butter” to “a butter”: An investigation of mass and count representation and processing

Abstract

This paper investigates the representation of mass and count nouns at the lexical-syntactic level, an issue that has not been addressed to date in psycholinguistic theories. A single case study is reported of a man with aphasia, R.A.P., who showed a countability specific deficit that affected processing of mass noun grammar. R.A.P. frequently substituted mass noun determiners (e.g., some, much) with count noun determiners (e.g., a, many). Experimental investigations determined that R.A.P. had a modality-neutral lexical-syntactic impairment. Furthermore, a series of novel experiments revealed that R.A.P.'s processing of mass noun determiners varied depending on how mass nouns were depicted (single vs. multiple depictions) and how congruent these were with the conceptual-semantic information of target determiners (e.g., "some" corresponds to multiple but not single concepts). R.A.P.'s determiner difficulties emerged only when mass nouns and determiners were number incongruent. The results of this research clearly indicate that nouns are lexical-syntactically specified for countability, but that the derivation of countability can additionally be influenced by conceptual-semantics.

Garlic and Ginger are not like Apples and Oranges: Effects of Mass/Count Information on the Production of Noun Phrases in English

“…As noted in the introduction, the representation of mass/count information is particularly interesting as its grammatical processing is influenced by both lexical-syntactic and conceptualsemantic information. This suggests that it is neither an intrinsic lexical-syntactic property (like grammatical gender) nor an extrinsic lexical-syntactic feature (like grammatical number) but rather a hybrid lexical-syntactic attribute (see Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2014. 7 The picture-word interference experiments reported here mostly replicate the previous literature that has shown that noun phrase production can be influenced by the lexical-syntactic attributes of noun distractors (e.g., grammatical gender, Schiller & Caramazza, 2003;Schriefers, 1993).…”

“…Countability is a particularly interesting lexical-syntactic attribute due to the fact that there appear to be clear influences of both conceptual semantics and lexical syntax (Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2014. This study used the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate lexical-syntactic processing of mass and count nouns.…”

“…This attribute at the lexical–syntactic level can be accessed and selected through the noun’s lexical–syntactic (lemma) representation, as for grammatical gender. However, unlike grammatical gender, the selection of mass/count noun attributes may be additionally influenced by conceptual–semantic mass/count information (for supporting evidence see Fieder, Nickels, & Biedermann, 2014; Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2014, 2015). Support for a syntactically driven mass/count distinction comes from an event-related potential (ERP) study by Steinhauer, Pancheva, Newman, Gennari, and Ullman (2001), which measured brain activity during reading of grammatically plausible mass and count noun sentences.…”

“…It is clear that most of the previous research on lexical syntax has focused on grammatical gender and number, with far less on the mass/count (countability) distinction (e.g., Barner & Snedeker, 2005, 2006; Gillon, Kehayia, & Taler, 1999; Mondini, Kehayia, Gillon, Arcara, & Jarema, 2009; Taler & Jarema, 2006, 2007; Vigliocco et al, 1999). Countability is a particularly interesting lexical–syntactic attribute due to the fact that there appear to be clear influences of both conceptual semantics and lexical syntax (Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2014, 2015). This study used the picture–word interference paradigm to investigate lexical–syntactic processing of mass and count nouns.…”

8 .Spoken word production: Processes and potential breakdown

“…We have used data from people with aphasia to inform this debate (Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2014;Fieder, Nickels, Biedermann, & Best, 2015). RAP and DEH were more impaired in describing pictures with noun phrases when those phrases required mass nouns (e.g., some rice) compared to when they required count nouns (e.g., a cat) (RAP 67% mass, 90% count; DEH 17% mass, 77% count).…”