Representation and processing of mass and count nouns: a review

Abstract

Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on countability. Therefore, this article reviews empirical evidence for lexical-syntactic specification of nouns for countability. This includes evidence from studies of language production and comprehension with normal speakers and case studies which assess impairments of mass/count nouns in people with acquired brain damage. Current theories of language processing are reviewed and found to be lacking specification regarding countability. Subsequently, the theoretical implications of the empirical studies are discussed in the context of frameworks derived from these accounts of language production (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999) and comprehension (Taler and Jarema, 2006). The review concludes that there is empirical support for specification of nouns for countability at a lexical-syntactic level.

Effects of regiolects on the perception of developmental foreign accent syndrome

“…Some lexical decision studies reported longer response times associated to the processing of mass nouns (Gillon et al, 1999;Mondini et al, 2009), whereas some others did not find any difference (Mondini et al, 2008;Franzon et al, 2016). A preference for countability is reported in studies on acquisition (Barner & Snedeker, 2005;Gathercole, 1985) and in neuropsychological studies Fieder et al, 2014;. Crucially, count syntax can be overextended to mass nouns even when other grammatical abilities are matured and/or spared, both in children's and patients' performance Semenza et al, 1997).…”

A Review on Grammatical Gender Agreement in Speech Production

“…In this latter model, the lexical-semantic network can directly activate the syntactic network and the phonological lexemes in parallel. Please note that both Dell’s interactive model and the Independent-Network model reject the seriality and discreteness of activation flow and in principle allow the bypassing of the retrieval of grammatical gender to specify the phonological form of noun phrases when the grammatical gender of the nouns is not explicitly marked in their phonological forms (see Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999 for a discussion).…”

“…Empirical studies have collected evidence from speech errors as well as error-free speech. Studies that analyze speech errors give hints on the representation and processing of grammatical gender in speech production (see Schriefers and Jescheniak, 1999 for a thorough review). For example, German noun substitution errors show that the intended and intruded nouns were often of the same gender and this phenomenon occurs even without syntactic cues, consistent with a two-stage language production model (Marx, 1999).…”

Grammaticalized number, implicated presuppositions, and the plural

“…For production and processing purposes, the evidence seems to suggest that they are lexically marked as mass or count. See Fieder, Nickels & Biedermann (2014) for a review and a proposal. 4 We assume that singular count nouns in English have a singular morpheme, spelled out as a zero morpheme.…”