The lexical-syntactic representation of number

Abstract

Number is an important aspect of lexical syntax. While there has been substantial research devoted to number agreement at the level of the sentence, relatively less attention has been paid to the representation of number at the level of individual lexical items. In this paper, we propose a representational framework for the lexical syntax of number in spoken word production that we believe can account for much of the data regarding number in noun and noun phrase production. This framework considers the representation of regular and irregular nouns, and more unusual cases such as pluralia tantum (e.g. scissors), zero plurals (e.g. sheep) and mass nouns (e.g. garlic). We not only address bare noun production but also the production of determiner + noun phrases. While focusing on examples from English, we extend the framework to include languages with grammatical gender such as German.

The production of singular- and plural-dominant nouns in Dutch

“…While a singular advantage only arises in a context in which the inflectional variants are non-uniformly distributed, uniformly distributed variants show a plural-advantage in this condition. These results challenge earlier proposals of plural production (e.g., Levelt et al, 1999) and demonstrate that recently revised theories of spoken word production are necessary to account for the fundamentally different mechanisms underlying the production of singular-dominant and plural-dominant words (e.g., Biedermann et al, 2013;Nickels et al, 2014).…”

“…A proposal that may be more successful in accounting for our data is one by Nickels, Biedermann, Fieder, and Schiller (2014). It returns to the original idea of a double listing for singulars and plurals at lexical-syntactic level (as proposed by Levelt et al 1999), but with the important difference that double listing is assumed for all singulars and plurals, regardless of dominance.…”

“…Panel A represents the production of singular-dominant and plural-dominant plurals, based on a word production theory proposed by Levelt et al (1999). Panel B refers to a morphological processing theory of word production proposed by Biedermann et al (2013), and Panel C refers to a theory by Nickels et al (2014).…”

Cognitive and neural constraints on theories of language production

“…The meeting in New York, NY, was supported by a National Science Foundation workshop grant focused on identifying constraints on theories of language production from cognitive, computational and neural domains. The five papers based on that meeting represent the diversity of research approaches that can be brought to bear in crucial questions regarding language production, including two papers addressing the interaction of language production and related cognitive domains (executive control : Friesen, Luo, Luk, & Bialystok, 2014;gesture: Trofatter, Kontra, Beilock, & Goldin-Meadow, 2014), a neuroimaging investigation of crucial production tasks (de Zubicaray, McMahon, & Howard, 2013), a provocative essay on the similarities and differences of speech perception and production (Remez, 2014) and a comprehensive review paper on the morphosyntactic processing of number (Nickels, Biedermann, Fieder, & Schiller, 2014). In the remainder of this paper, each contribution will be introduced in the order they appear in the special issue, reflecting the breadth of topics relevant to our understanding of language production.…”

“…This represents a rich area at the border of accounts of single-word lexical access and grammatical agreement phenomena in phrases and in sentences. Nickels et al (2014) provide a comprehensive review of the work on number at the word-level and present an integrative representational framework that captures the critical findings in this area, including a detailed treatment of the recalcitrant issues in this domain such as areas of disagreement between conceptual number and grammatical number (e.g., mass nouns) and differences between singulardominant (e.g., cat) and plural-dominant (e.g., beans) nouns. The review also places these ideas in the context of prominent accounts of lexical access (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) and highlights the constraints on those theories that are placed by a complete treatment of this issue.…”