The mental representation of plural events.

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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The mental representation of plural events Nikole D. Patson & Tessa Warren To cite this article: Nikole D. Patson & Tessa Warren (2015) The mental representation of plural events, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68:7, 1249-1267, DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.976578 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.976578

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Date: 05 November 2015, At: 22:55

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2015 Vol. 68, No. 7, 1249–1267, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.976578

The mental representation of plural events Nikole D. Patson1 and Tessa Warren2 1

Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, Marion, OH, USA Departments of Psychology and Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 2015.68:1249-1267.

(Received 28 January 2014; accepted 6 August 2014; first published online 20 November 2014)

A growing body of work suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, comprehenders leave their mental representations of plural entities underspecified—that is, they mentally represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as groups or nondifferentiated sets. The current paper investigates whether this also holds for plural events. Experiments 1a–1b used an aspectual coercion manipulation to provide evidence that event plurality can be indexed by the number-of-words judgement task that Patson and Warren [2010. Evidence for distributivity effects in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 782–789] used to investigate the mental representation of plural nouns. Experiment 2 confirmed this by showing that comprehenders mentally represent predicates associated with distributive quantifiers as plural, and they do so immediately at the verb rather than waiting until the completion of the predicate. Experiment 3 probed inherently distributed verbs and showed that inherent distributivity is not enough to push comprehenders to mentally represent multiple events. Only when the subject of an inherently distributed verb is a conjoined NP, rather than a plural definite description, do comprehenders mentally represent multiple events. Experiment 4 replicated and extended Experiment 3. This body of findings suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, plural events are left underspecified. However, when disambiguating information is provided, comprehenders do mentally represent number information explicitly and incrementally. Keywords: Plurals; Underspecification.

Distributivity;

Aspectual

Most psycholinguistic work on reference has focused on how singular referents are represented and referred to across a discourse. However, there is a growing body of work investigating how comprehenders mentally represent plural entities (e.g., Kaup, Kelter, & Habel, 2002; Koh & Clifton, 2002; Koh, Sanford, Clifton, & Dawydiak, 2008; Moxey, Sanford, Sturt, & Morrow, 2004; Patson

coercion;

Events;

Semantic

representations;

& Ferreira, 2009; Patson & Warren, 2011). This work suggests that in the absence of strong cues to individuation, comprehenders leave their mental representations of plurals underspecified— that is, they mentally represent plural noun phrases (NPs) as groups or nondifferentiated sets (e.g., Patson & Ferreira, 2009; Patson & Warren, 2011). Less is known about how plural events are

Correspondence should be addressed to Nikole D. Patson, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University, 1465 Mt. Vernon Avenue, Marion, OH 43302, USA. E-mail: [email protected] We thank Charles Perfetti, Erik Reichle, Mike Dickey, Natasha Tokowicz, and other members of the Pitt Reading and Language Lab. We also thank Jessica Apsley, Emily Harbolt, Sam Ludwig, CheyAnne Mullins, Abigail Noblet, Christa Reffey, Ellie Rieser, Hannah Russell, and Amanda Ward for assistance collecting data. Experiment 1b was conducted at the Buckeye Language Network Language Sciences Lab at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. © 2014 The Experimental Psychology Society

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represented. Given that verbs are more likely to be left underspecified than nouns (e.g., Getner & France, 1988), plural events may be more likely to be left underspecified than plural entities. The current paper investigates the conditions under which comprehenders mentally represent plural events in a relatively specified way—for example, as sets of individuated events—versus in a less specified way—for example, as a single, nondifferentiated plural event. Comprehenders’ mental representations for plurals can have different properties depending on the context. One way to categorize these representations is with respect to how detailed, or specified, they are. In the least specified representations, a plural is instantiated as a group of entities (potentially involved in an event or events), yet there is no information as to how many subentities or events there are or what features characterize or distinguish them. Consider The cats fought. In a null context, this sentence could equally well describe a pair of cats fighting, multiple groups of cats fighting, or a writhing ball of an indeterminate number of clawing cats. The least specified representation that could be built for this sentence would include a group of cats and some fighting but leave the mappings between them unspecified. It is even possible that the plurality of the group may be unspecified, given evidence that plurals can be unmarked for number (e.g., Patson, 2014; Sauerland, Anderssen, & Yatsushiro, 2005). To see this, consider the following examples from Sauerland et al. (2005): 1. 2.

You’re welcome to bring your children. You’re welcome to bring your two or more children.

The plural in (1) is felicitous even if the addressee only has one child, as long as the speaker is unaware of how many children the addressee has. However, the plural in (2) requires that the speaker know that the addressee has at least two children. This indicates that plural NPs do not have to refer to sets of multiple individuals—they can be used flexibly to refer to sets that are unspecified with respect to number.

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A slightly more specified kind of plural representation highlights the plurality of the plural set or event, yet does not individuate the subentities or subevents within the plural. Each cat meowed is probably represented this way; it highlights the fact that there is a set made up of individual cats, and a pairing between individual cats and meowing events, but does not indicate how many cats or meowing events there are, nor does it allow access to any particular cat or meowing event. In highly specified plural representations, both the plural and the entities and subevents within it are represented and can be accessed. For example, consider what kind of representation might be built for a sentence like: The grey cat ran quickly and the white cat ran slowly. It probably includes two individual cats and two individual running events, as well as the plural set of cats and a running event including both cats. Research suggests that comprehenders’ attention can shift among these different aspects of a highly specified representation over the course of a dialogue (e.g., Albrecht & Clifton, 1998). For example, a continuation of “while they ran” focuses attention on the group event, whereas a continuation of “the white one was tired” focuses attention on the individual slow running event. Most research on this kind of highly specified representation, in which both the plural set and the distinct individuals are accessible, has involved NP conjunction; in that literature these entity representations are called complex reference objects (Eschenbach, Habel, Herweg, & Rehkämper, 1989; Moxey et al., 2004). Considerable research has investigated the conditions under which plural sets of individuals are mentally represented at different positions along this continuum of specificity (Frazier, Pacht, & Rayner, 1999; Kaup et al., 2002; Patson & Ferreira, 2009; Patson, George, & Warren, 2014; Patson & Warren, 2011). Patson and Ferreira (2009) argued that by default, the mental representations created for plural definite descriptions (e.g., the cats) are groups, whereas those for conjoined NPs (e.g., John and Mary) are complex reference objects. Patson and Ferreira’s evidence was based on findings from a garden-path paradigm first used in Ferreira and McClure (1997). When

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processing a sentence-initial subordinate clause not followed by a comma, readers very often interpret the NP after the verb as its object. If the NP instead ends up being the subject of an upcoming clause, as in (3) and (4), then reading is disrupted (e.g., Christianson, Hollingworth, Halliwell, & Ferreira, 2001; Mitchell, 1987). 3. 4.


5.

While Mary walked the baby cried in the crib. While the two lovers kissed the baby cried in the crib. While John and Mary kissed the baby cried in the crib.

However, readers are more likely to interpret the NP after the verb as the subject of an upcoming clause when the subject of the subordinate clause is a conjoined NP, and the verb is reciprocal, as in (5) (Ferreira & McClure, 1997; Patson & Ferreira, 2009; Patson & Warren, 2011). Patson and Ferreira (2009) found that readers’ disruption was reduced only when the verb was reciprocal, and the subject was conjoined (or an anaphor that referred to a conjoined referent). When the verb was optionally transitive (e.g., walked), or the subject was a plural definite description (e.g., the lovers) or a quantified plural (e.g., the two lovers, in Sentence 4), readers interpreted the NP after the verb as an object. Patson and Ferreira argued that this is because the individuals in the complex reference object introduced by the conjunction fill the reciprocal verb’s thematic roles, leaving no open role for the upcoming NP. Patson and Warren’s (2011) findings supported this account by showing that adding differentiating modifiers (e.g., one of whom was tall ) to the plural NPs in sentences like (4) changed reading behaviours and caused readers to interpret them like (5). These results suggest that by default, definite descriptions like the lovers or the two lovers are represented as undifferentiated groups, but that conjunctions or definite descriptions individuated by modifiers are represented as complex reference objects. A number of experimental methods have provided windows into comprehenders’ mental rep-

resentations of plural sets of entities. But most of these methods are of little use in helping us learn about how comprehenders mentally represent plural events. Although the Ferreira and McClure (1997) paradigm works because of changes in event representations, it is diagnostic of the availability of multiple sets of entities, not events. In English, the lack of event anaphors marked for number makes methods relying on anaphora (e.g., Kurtzman & MacDonald, 1993) unpromising. However, a method that Patson and Warren (2010) recently used to address scope ambiguity in sentences with distributing quantifiers may allow us to determine the conditions under which comprehenders build more versus less specified plural event representations. Patson and Warren (2010) extended a method developed by Berent, Pinker, Tzelgov, Bibi, and Goldfarb (2005). In the Berent et al. study, participants were shown either a single word or two words and were asked to judge how many words appeared on the screen. Participants were slower to make correct judgements to a single word when it was plural than when it was singular. Berent et al. argued that this was due to interference between the number judgement task and the semantic number information inherent to plural NPs.1 Patson and Warren extended this method to sentences and used it to test whether, in sentences like (6), comprehenders assign wide scope to the distributing quantifier (each of the men) or the existential quantifier (a box). If comprehenders assign wide scope to the distributing quantifier, it would result in an interpretation that can be paraphrased as “for each man there is a box that he carried”. The most natural reading of this would involve multiple boxes. If comprehenders assign wide scope to the existential quantifier, it would result in an interpretation that can be paraphrased as “there is a single box and each man carried it”. This reading necessitates a single box. In Patson and Warren’s critical experiment, participants read distributed (6) and collective (7) sentences presented in one- and two-word chunks.

1 Berent et al. did not consistently find the opposite pattern. That is, it did not take participants longer to respond that two words were on the screen when the words were singular than when they were plural.


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6. 7.

Each of the men carried a box. Together the men carried a box.

The critical word was the NP in the predicate: box in the examples above. At the critical word, participants judged whether one or two words appeared on the screen. Patson and Warren (2010) found that participants were slower to answer “one” in distributed predicates than in collective predicates. This suggested that participants mentally represented singular-marked NPs in distributed predicates as plural, meaning that wide scope had been assigned to the distributing quantifier. But importantly, the only way to represent the singular-marked NPs as plural in these sentences is to represent the referents of those NPs as distributed across multiple events. Although this previous work tested entity plurality, it raises the possibility that this plural interference paradigm might be sensitive to event plurality. To preview the findings of the current paper, we found that this paradigm can be used to index the plurality of event representations. This allowed us to investigate the conditions under which comprehenders build mental representations of plural events at a relatively unspecified group level, in which a plural group is the agent of some single group event, versus at a more specified subevent

level, in which the existence of subevents within the group event is salient, even if they are not individuated (see Figure 1). To give a concrete example, when reading The girls ate ice cream, do comprehenders represent a single ice-cream-eating event accomplished by a group of girls? Do they alternately or in addition represent multiple ice-cream-eating subevents, each of which has a girl or girls as its agent? In the current paper, we report four experiments that used Patson and Warren’s (2010) paradigm to investigate what cues push comprehenders to build plural event representations that either do or do not instantiate or highlight subevents. Experiment 1 investigated plural interference at verbs denoting punctual events that had or had not been aspectually coerced to be iterative, to provide evidence that the paradigm is capable of indexing whether a comprehender has built a singular or plural event representation. Experiment 2 compared collective versus distributed events to provide additional evidence for this point; it also investigated the time course of plural event representation building. Experiment 3 probed for effects of verb semantics and the form of the subject on the specificity of plural event representations. Experiment 4 followed up on Experiment 3 using punctual events that had or had not been aspectually coerced to be iterative.

Figure 1. Representation of event structure for plural events.

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EXPERIMENT 1A


Experiment 1a tested whether event plurality can be indexed by the number judgement interference method Patson and Warren (2010) used to index the plurality of entity representations. Event plurality was manipulated by comparing sentences with a punctual event that was preceded by a modifier that either did or did not coerce it into being interpreted iteratively. Consider the following pair of sentences from Brennan and Pylkkänen (2008): 8. 9.

After twenty minutes the student sneezed in the back of the classroom. Throughout the day the student sneezed in the back of the classroom.

The verb sneezed is a punctual verb, meaning it describes a single event that does not have a duration—it takes place in an instant (as in Sentence 8). However, the addition of a durative modifier (throughout the day in Sentence 9) forces the reader to interpret the verb iteratively, meaning that they must represent multiple sneezing events. This is an example of what is known as aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman, 1988; Pustejovsky, 1991). If event plurality is like entity plurality in interfering with participants’ ability to make singleword judgements (as in Patson & Warren, 2010), participants should be slower to judge that the verb is a single word within sentences with iterative (i.e., plural) interpretations like (9) than within sentences with punctual interpretations like (8).

Method Participants Forty-two undergraduates from the Ohio State University, Marion participated in exchange for partial course credit. All were native speakers of American English. Design and stimuli The experiment had a single-factor within-participants design. The first condition included items with single punctual event interpretations as in (8), and the second condition included items with

multiple (iterative) punctual event interpretations as in (9). The items were taken from Brennan and Pylkkänen (2008), who reported that they had been normed to ensure that (a) the default interpretation for the subject–verb combination was punctual, and (b) there were no plausibility differences between conditions. The 30 experimental items were presented with the 42 items from Experiment 3 and 70 filler items. See Supplemental Material for full set of items. Filler items had various structures, and approximately one third included quantifiers. Apparatus Stimuli were displayed at a resolution of 1600 × 1200 pixels by a 32-bit colour on a 20′′ Dell FPb monitor driven by a NVIDIA GeForce3 video graphics card with a screen refresh rate of 100 Hz. Fluorescent overhead lighting illuminated the room. Stimulus presentation and response collection were controlled by E-Prime experimental software (Schneider, Eschmann, & Zuccolotto, 2002). Responses were recorded via keyboard press. The display monitor was interfaced with a 2-GHz, IntelCore 2 desktop computer. The computer controlled the experiment and recorded time values for all button press events over the course of each trial. Procedure Participants were tested individually or in small groups of no more than five. After providing informed consent, participants read the instructions and participated in one practice block of eight trials before moving on to the experiment. When participants were ready to begin a trial, they looked at a fixation cross in the centre of the screen and pressed the space bar. Sentences were presented in black font in a mix of one- and two-word centrally presented chunks. Participants were instructed to read the chunk and then press the space bar to continue reading the sentence. Throughout the experiment, there were an approximately equal number of oneand two-word chunks. The critical chunk of the sentence was presented in blue font. Participants were instructed that blue font was a cue for them to decide whether there were one or two words on the screen. They did so by pressing either the “1” key or the “2” key on the keyboard. There was an


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approximately equal number of one- and two-word judgements made across the experiment. In all of the experimental trials, the decision was made on one word, and in the filler trials the decision was made on two words. Experiment trials only included one-word judgements because in the Berent et al. (2005) study, interference from semantic number information was found for one-word judgements but not consistently for two-word judgements. Thus, we would not predict a slower response time for a two-word judgement when that word appears in a singular event. After making the number judgement, a comprehension question appeared, to which participants responded “yes” or “no” by pressing prespecified buttons. Data analysis Data were subjected to repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) using participants (F1) and items (F2) as random factors.

Results Comprehension rates for the yes/no questions were high. Participants answered 98% (SD 3.1%) of the questions correctly. Additionally, participants were

95% (SD 3.3%) accurate on the number judgement task. Accuracy rates did not differ by condition. The critical measure was the reaction time for number judgements for correct trials only. Participants were reliably slower to make “one” judgements in the iterative condition (M = 1005.29 ms, SD = 239 ms) than in the punctual condition (M = 964 ms, SD = 221 ms), F1(1, 41) = 12.60, MSE = 3184.81, p = .001; F2(1, 29) = 7.75, MSE = 5355.68, p = .009. Please see Figure 2 for means.

Discussion Participants were slower to judge that a verb was a single word when it was interpreted as introducing multiple iterative events rather than a single punctual event. This suggests that the plurality inherent in building multiple events interferes with participants’ ability to perform a number judgement task. However, the current experiment cannot not rule out the alternative possibility that coercion itself may have caused slower reaction times in the iterative condition. A number of studies have shown processing costs associated with coercion (e.g., Husband, Stockall, & Beretta, 2010;

Figure 2. Mean number judgement times for correct trials in Experiment 1A. Error bars indicate standard error.

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Pickering, McElree, Frisson, Chen, & Traxler, 2006; Piñango, Winnick, Ullah, & Zurif, 2006; Proctor, Dickey, & Rips, 2004; Todorova, Straub, Badecker, & Frank, 2000). To rule out this alternative explanation of the findings reported in Experiment 1a, we conducted Experiment 1b.


EXPERIMENT 1B Experiment 1b was designed to determine whether the effects found in Experiment 1a were due to participants creating multiple event representations for iterative events compared to single punctual events or whether the effects were due to the semantic complexity inherent in coerced predicates. To test this, we re-ran Experiment 1a but included another task. In Experiment 1b, in addition to the number-of-words judgement task, we also included a consonant/vowel task. Participants were asked to judge whether the critical word began with a consonant or a vowel. If the effects in Experiment 1a were due simply to semantic complexity, we should find a main effect of event type in Experiment 1b, such that participants show an increased judgement time whether performing the number-of-words judgement task or the consonant vowel task. However, if the effects in Experiment 1a were due to the interference of number information from the iterative predicates then we predict an interaction such that participants will be slower to make critical judgements for iterative predicates when making the number-of-words judgements but not when making the consonant/vowel judgements.

Method Participants Forty-eight native speakers of American English volunteered to participate. Participants were recruited from the Columbus Center of Science and Industry (COSI). Design and stimuli The experiment had a 2 × 2 within-participants design. The first factor was the task type. Participants either made number of word judgements

on the critical region of the sentence or decided whether the word in the critical region began with a consonant or a vowel. The second factor was the event type: single punctual events or iterative events. The same stimuli as those from Experiment 1A were used in Experiment 1B. An additional two items were created so that an equal number of items appeared in each condition of the experiment (see Supplemental Material). The 32 experimental items were counterbalanced across four lists using a Latin-square design. Experimental items were presented with 32 filler items. Apparatus The trials were presented using E-Prime v.2 experimental software (Schneider et al., 2002). A Dell P2412H 24-inch monitor (1920 × 1080 pixels) displayed stimuli with a screen refresh rate of 60 Hz. Keyboard presses were used to log responses and record reaction time. Procedure Participants were tested individually or in pairs. The experiment was divided into two blocks. Half of the participants performed the number-of-words judgement task in the first block and the consonant/ vowel judgement task in the second block. After providing informed consent, participants read the instructions and participated in one practice block of eight trials before moving on to the experiment. After the first block, participants read the instructions for the second block and performed eight practice trials before moving on to the experimental trials. In both blocks of the experiment, trials began with a fixation cross in the centre of the screen. When participants were ready to begin a trial they pressed the space bar. Sentences were presented in black font in a mix of one- and two-word centrally presented chunks. Participants were instructed to read the chunk and then press the space bar to continue reading the sentence. Throughout the experiment, there was an equal number of one- and two-word chunks. The critical chunk of the sentence was presented in blue font. In the numberof-words judgement task, participants were instructed that blue font was a cue for them to decide whether there were one or two words on


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the screen. They did so by pressing either the “1” key or the “2” key on the keyboard. In all of the experimental trials, the decision was made on one word, and in the filler trials the decision was made on two words. Thus, an equal number of one- and two-word judgements were made across the experiment. In the consonant/vowel task, participants were instructed that the blue font was a cue for them to decide whether the word began with a vowel (press the “1” key) or a consonant (press the “2” key). In all of the experimental trials, the critical word began with a consonant, and in all of the filler trials the word began with a vowel. To keep both blocks of the experiment as similar as possible, all judgements were made on the verb region of the sentence. In the two-word judgement filler trials, the judgement region included the verb and the word immediately after the verb. After making the critical judgement, a comprehension question appeared, to which participants responded “yes” or “no” by pressing prespecified buttons. Data analysis Data were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs using participants (F1) and items (F2) as random factors.

Results Comprehension rates for the yes/no questions were high. Participants answered 97% (3.0% SD) of the questions correctly. Overall, participants were 97% (SD 3.8%) accurate on the judgement tasks (97% for number judgement trials and 96% for consonant/vowel judgement trials). Accuracy rates did not differ by condition or task. Again the critical measure was the reaction time for correct judgements only. There was a main effect of task. Participants were reliably slower to make consonant/vowel judgements (M = 1150 ms, SD = 308 ms) than number-of-word judgements (M = 972 ms, SD = 279 ms), F1(1, 47) = 32.44, MSE = 46,355.01, p , .001; F2(1, 31) = 92.52, MSE = 10,545.86, p , .001. Critically, there was a significant interaction between event type and task type, F1(1, 47) = 5.74, MSE = 13,154.11, p = .021; F2(1, 31) = 6.96, MSE = 8488.50, p = .013. In the number-of-words judgement task, participants were slower to make judgements when the event was iterative (M = 999 ms, SD = 308 ms) than when it was a single, durative event (M = 947 ms, SD = 263 ms), t1(47) = 2.73, p = .009; t2(31) = 2.099, p = .044. In the consonant/vowel judgement task, there were no

Figure 3. Mean number judgement time by condition for correct trials only in Experiment 1B. Error bars indicate standard error.

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reliable differences in judgement times based on event type, t1(47) = 1.09, p = .28; t2(31) = 0.925, p = .362. Please see Figure 3 for means.


Discussion Experiment 1b replicated the findings presented in Experiment 1a—that is, participants were slower to judge that one word was on the screen when it was embedded in an iterative event than when it was embedded in a single durative event. Critically, this effect was not present when participants were asked to make consonant/vowel judgements. These effects suggest that the findings presented in Experiment 1a (as well as the findings presented below) are not simply due to semantic complexity. Rather the effects are due to the interference of the number information from the event and the number-of-words judgement task.

EXPERIMENT 2 Experiment 2 followed up Experiment 1 in testing whether Patson and Warren’s (2010) paradigm is sensitive to event plurality. Remember that Patson and Warren (2010) found that comprehenders mentally represented entities in distributed predicates (e.g., box in Each of the men carried a box) as plural. For this to be the case, comprehenders must have been representing multiple box-carrying subevents. But given that Patson and Warren tested for plural interference only on nouns, and there could be differences in entity versus event representations, it is important to directly test whether this paradigm is sensitive to event plurality. The second aim of Experiment 2 was to determine when during processing comprehenders build subevents into their event representations. Evidence suggests that comprehenders sometimes delay settling on interpretations for verbs with multiple senses until the end of a clause (Pickering & Frisson, 2001). To test whether event representations are specified immediately at the verb or only after the event is semantically complete, Experiment 2 manipulated verb type. We compared event representations at intransitive verbs, which are

semantically complete without an object, to representations at transitive verbs, which are semantically incomplete until their object has been encountered. If comprehenders delay specifying the mental representation of an event until it is semantically complete, then effects associated with the construction of multiple subevents should be detected at intransitive verbs but not transitive verbs. If comprehenders do not delay specification, both verb types should pattern similarly.

Method Participants Forty-four undergraduates from the University of Pittsburgh participated in exchange for partial course credit. All were native speakers of American English. Design and stimuli Experiment 2 had a 2 × 2 design. The first variable was quantifier type, which had two levels: collective (together, 10a, 10c) versus distributed (each, 10b, 10d). The second variable was the verb type: transitive (10a, 10b) versus intransitive (10c, 10d). 10a.

Together the hikers calmly pitched tent. 10b. Each of the hikers calmly pitched tent. 10c. Together the hikers calmly slept in tent. 10d. Each of the hikers calmly slept in tent.

a small a small a small a small

The critical region, where number judgements were taken, was the verb (pitched in 10a, 10b; slept in 10c, 10d). The 32 experimental stimuli were divided into four lists using a Latin square design. Each item appeared in one condition on each list. Participants saw only one list. The items were presented with 90 fillers. Filler items were the same across all lists. Apparatus Stimuli were displayed at a resolution of 800 by 600 pixels by a 24-bit colour on a 19-inch Dell P991 monitor driven by a NVIDIA GeForce3 video


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graphics card with a screen refresh rate of 100 Hz. Fluorescent overhead lighting illuminated the room. Stimulus presentation and response collection were controlled by E-Prime experimental software (Schneider et al., 2002). Responses were recorded via keyboard press. The display monitor was interfaced with a 2-GHz Pentium 4 desktop computer. The computer controlled the experiment and recorded time values for all button press events over the course of each trial. Procedure The same procedure as that used in Experiment 1 was used in Experiment 2. Data analysis Data were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs using participants (F1) and items (F2) as random factors.

Results Comprehension rates for the yes/no questions were high. Participants answered 93% (SD 4.1%) of the questions correctly. Additionally, participants were

93% (SD 7.0%) accurate on the number judgement task. Accuracy rates did not differ by condition. The critical measure was number judgement reaction time (at the verb) for correct number judgement trials only. See Figure 4 for means. There was a main effect of quantifier such that participants were faster to judge that one word was on the screen when the quantifier was “together” (M = 875 ms; SD = 173 ms) than when the quantifier was “each” (M = 906 ms; SD = 204 ms), F1(1, 43) = 4.08, MSE = 10,650.68, p = .05; F2(1, 31) = 4.84, MSE = 7803.51, p = .035. There was no reliable main effect of verb type and no interaction, all Fs , 1.

Discussion In Experiment 2, participants were slower to judge that the verb on the screen was a single word in the distributed conditions than in the collective conditions. This finding parallels Patson and Warren’s (2010) findings for nouns and provides important evidence that this number interference paradigm is sensitive to the plurality of not only entity representations but also event representations. Whereas there

Figure 4. Mean number judgement time by condition for correct trials only in Experiment 2. Error bars indicate standard error.

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was no interference on verbs encoding a single collective event, the plurality inherent in building a representation with multiple subevents did interfere with participants’ number judgements. In Experiment 2, verb type did not influence number judgement times. This suggests that following distributive quantifiers, comprehenders build event representations with multiple subevents immediately; there is no evidence that comprehenders wait to specify their event representations until the full event semantics are available. It is interesting to consider what mental representation caused plural interference in Experiment 2. A possibility we have not considered is that the plural interference measured at the verb could have been due to lingering activation associated with the quantified sentential subject rather than activation associated with the verb. To spell this out, the plurality difference detected in Experiment 2 could have resulted from representations built for each of the hikers versus together the hikers, before either was combined with the verb. However, the representations associated with these quantified phrases are still the beginnings of event representations, given that the quantifier’s function is to specify the mapping between the plural subject referents and the predicate. Consider each of the hikers. Although this is just a quantified NP, it necessitates that any upcoming event will be multiple events distributed across the hikers and thus be plural. In effect, it provides the event structure even before the verb contributes the event content. This possibility will not be a concern in Experiments 3 or 4.

EXPERIMENT 3 Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2 demonstrated that Patson and Warren’s (2010) paradigm is sensitive to the presence or salience of multiple subevents within a plural event representation. Experiment 3 built on these findings to probe ways that verb semantics and sentential subject form might affect event representations. The specific question related to verb semantics was whether inherently distributed predicates drive comprehenders to build event

representations that include multiple subevents. Inherently distributed verbs, like sleep, can only apply to individuals, not groups—that is, only individuals can have the property of sleeping, a group cannot. If comprehenders interpret inherently distributed predicates as applying only to individuals, then upon encountering a sentence like The cats slept, they should build a distributed event representation with a different sleeping event for each cat. Given the findings of Experiment 2, this would predict plural interference on single-word judgements for inherently distributed verbs with plural subjects compared to inherently distributed verbs with singular subjects. Alternatively, comprehenders might underspecify the meanings of inherently distributed verbs. Pickering and Frisson (2001) found that vague verbs (i.e., verbs that have multiple related senses) are left underspecified until evidence indicates the correct sense. The verb disarm is an example of a vague verb because it can mean to remove either weapons or hostility—for example, as in We disarmed the terrorist versus His joke disarmed the critic (Pickering & Frisson, 2001). Some inherently distributed verbs seem to have a similar type of vagueness. Consider the sentence in (11): 11.

The twenty teenagers ate the pizza.

The verb eat, meaning to take a bite and swallow, must apply to an individual—a group cannot jointly take a bite and swallow. If the verb is interpreted in this sense, the sentence in (11) has a distributed meaning in which every teenager swallowed at least one bite of pizza. However, ate can also mean something more like consumed. In this case, (11) would mean that the pizza is now gone because many (or most) of the teenagers participated in the eating event by taking a bite of the pizza. Critically, this reading is a group reading, because it can still be true even if one or more of the teenagers did not actually take a bite of pizza. This raises the possibility that comprehenders might establish a group reading for certain vague inherently distributed verbs. However, even for more strongly distributed verbs, it seems possible that comprehenders might establish a group reading. For example, sleep is


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relatively strongly distributed given that it is difficult to generate an interpretation of a sentence like The twenty cats slept in which it is not the case that every cat was sleeping. But even here, it may be possible for comprehenders to build an underspecified event representation in which there is a set of cats and some sleeping, but the mapping between them is not specified. If comprehenders initially interpret events in the least specified way possible, they may build group event representations for all inherently distributed verbs and not show plural interference for inherently distributed verbs with plural subjects. Another factor that may affect the way comprehenders build representations for inherently distributed verbs is the verb’s subject type. If the subject of a vague inherently distributed verb is conjoined, as in (12), it seems to disallow any group interpretation. 12.

John and Mary ate the pizza.

The sentence in (12) is unlikely to be true if one or the other of John and Mary did not take a bite of pizza. One reason for this could be the fact that conjoined NPs introduce a fully specified entity structure that includes individuated subentities. Perhaps given a representation that includes accessible individuals, comprehenders automatically apply inherently distributed verbs to those individuals, but given a group representation, they only loosely specify the mapping between such verbs and their subjects. If this is the case, then we should find an increased number judgement time for inherently distributed verbs with conjoined subjects compared to the same verbs with subjects that are mentally represented as groups (i.e., plural definite descriptions).

description (as in Sentence 14), or a conjoined NP (as in Sentence 15). 13. 14. 15.

The dog in the living room lazily sat in the sun all morning. The dogs in the living room lazily sat in the sun all morning. The dog and the cat lazily sat in the sun all morning.

The critical word in all of the sentences was the intransitive, inherently distributed verb. In the singular and plural conditions, the subject noun was followed by a modifying prepositional phrase so that (a) there was a gap between the number marking and the verb, and (b) the length of the subject NP was more similar across the three conditions. Within an item, the critical verb was always preceded by the same adverb. The 42 experimental stimuli were divided into three lists using a Latin square design. Each item appeared in one condition on each list. Participants saw only one list. The items were presented with 70 fillers and the 30 items from Experiment 1. Filler items were the same across all lists. Apparatus and procedure The same apparatus and procedure as those used in Experiment 1 were used in Experiment 3. Data analysis Data were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs using participants (F1) and items (F2) as random factors.

Results Method Participants The same set of 42 Ohio State University, Marion undergraduates who participated in Experiment 1 participated in Experiment 3 at the same time. Design and stimuli Experiment 3 had a single factor with three levels. The subject of the sentence was a singular definite description (as in Sentence 13), plural definite

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Comprehension rates for the yes/no questions were high. Participants answered 91% (SD 0.8%) of the questions correctly. Additionally, participants were 98% (SD 2.2%) accurate on the number judgement task. Accuracy rates did not differ by condition. The critical measure was the number judgement reaction time (on the verb) for correct number judgement trials only. See Figure 5 for means. Subject type had a reliable effect, F1(2, 82) = 5.62, MSE = 6870.41, p = .006; F2(2, 82) = 6.74, MSE =



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Figure 5. Mean number judgement time by condition for correct trials only in Experiment 3. DD = definite description. Error bars indicate standard error.

7127.65, p = .002, but plurality did not drive it. Instead, judgement times in the conjoined subject condition (M = 1016 ms, SD = 292 ms) were significantly slower than those in the other two conditions: singular (M = 969 ms, SD = 231 ms) [t1(41) = 2.67, p = .011; t2(41) = 3.02, p = .004]; plural (M = 963 ms, SD = 236 ms) [t1(41) = 2.80, p = .008; t2(41) = 3.32, p = .002]. Judgement times following singular and plural definite descriptions did not differ reliably, t1(41) = 0.41, p = .682; t2(41) = 0.30, p = .763.

judgements in comparison to the singular condition. The current findings suggest that only when the subject of the sentence is a complex reference object do comprehenders specify the presence of multiple subevents within their event representations for inherently distributed verbs. It is unlikely that this effect is due simply to the structure of the conjoined subject, given that Patson and Ferreira (2009) never found that a conjoined subject led to longer reading times on the verb than a plural definite description subject or a quantified plural subject. However, we further address this possibility in Experiment 4.

Discussion In Experiment 3, participants were slower to judge that the verb was a single word when the subject of the sentence was a conjoined NP than when it was a plural or singular definite description. The fact that reaction times in the plural definite condition were almost identical to those in the singular condition suggests that none of our inherently distributed verbs forced the representation of multiple subevents when combined with a plural definite description. Even if only a few of our strongest inherently distributed verbs had done so, that should have slowed

EXPERIMENT 4 Experiment 4 was designed to further establish that comprehenders represent multiple subevents when the subject of the event is a complex reference object. In Experiment 3, participants were slower to make a single-word judgement when the subject of the sentence was conjoined but not when it was a singular or plural definite description. However, it is possible that the number judgement disruption could have been driven by the complex


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structure of the conjoined NP. Experiment 4 was designed to address this issue by crossing the subject type with the event type. As in Experiment 1, we used modifiers that forced either a punctual or an iterative interpretation of the predicate. We also compared three subject types: singular definite descriptions, plural definite descriptions, and conjoined NPs. If (a) number judgement disruption is related to plural event building, and (b) conjunctions but not singular or plural definite descriptions lead comprehenders to represent multiple events, then number judgements should be slower when the quantifier specifies an iterative interpretation, regardless of subject type, because the iterative interpretation requires multiple events. However, when the quantifier specifies a single event, subject type should affect number judgement disruption in the same way as it did in Experiment 3, with slower number judgements following conjoined subjects than definite description subjects. On the other hand, if the number judgement disruption in the conjoined subject condition in Experiment 3 was due simply to the presence of a conjunction, then such an effect should be evident in both the iterative and punctual conditions in Experiment 4.

Method

16b. Every Saturday the soldier in the army excitedly returned for a weekend. 16c. Every Saturday the soldier and the medic excitedly returned for a weekend. 17a. On Saturday the soldiers in the army excitedly returned for a weekend. 17b. On Saturday the soldier in the army excitedly returned for a weekend. 17c. On Saturday the soldier and the medic excitedly returned for a weekend. The critical word in all of the sentences was the verb. As in Experiment 3, in the singular and plural conditions, the subject noun was followed by a modifying prepositional phrase so that (a) there was a gap between the number marking and the verb, and (b) the length of the subject NP was more similar across the three conditions. Within an item, the critical verb was always preceded by the same adverb. The 42 experimental stimuli were divided into three lists using a Latin square design. Each item appeared in one condition on each list. Participants saw only one list. The items were presented with 42 fillers. Filler items were the same across all lists. Apparatus and procedure The same apparatus and procedure as those used in Experiments 1 and 3 were used in Experiment 4.

Participants Seventy-two Ohio State University, Marion undergraduates participated for partial course credit. All were native English speakers.

Data analysis Data were subjected to repeated measures ANOVAs using participants (F1) and items (F2) as random factors.

Design and stimuli Experiment 4 had a 2 × 3 repeated measures design. The first factor was the quantifier type. The quantifier forced either an iterative interpretation of the predicate (16) or a punctual interpretation (17). The second factor was the subject type. The subject of the sentence was (a) a plural definite description, (b) a singular definite description, or (c) a conjoined NP.

Results

16a.

Every Saturday the soldiers in the army excitedly returned for a weekend.

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Comprehension rates for the yes/no questions were high. Participants answered 93% (SD 7.8%) of the questions correctly. Additionally, participants were 86% (SD 8.4%) accurate on the number judgement task. Accuracy rates did not differ by condition. The critical measure was the number judgement reaction time on the verb for correct number judgement trials only. See Figure 6 for means. Quantifiertype had a reliable effect, F1(1, 71) = 7.58, MSE = 46,548.54, p = .007;



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Figure 6. Mean number judgement time by condition for correct trials only in Experiment 4. DD = definite description. Error bars indicate standard error.

F2(1, 41) = 7.231, MSE = 14,724.55, p = .01. Participants were faster to make the single-word judgement when the quantifier indicated that the event was punctual (M = 857 ms) than when it was iterative (M = 914 ms). There was no main effect of subject type (ps . .05), nor did the two factors interact, F1(2, 142) = 1.54, p = .22; F2(2, 82) = 0.92, p = .40. Although the interaction between quantifier and subject type was not significant, the pattern of means was as predicted. In the punctual conditions, planned comparisons indicated a replication of Experiment 3. That is, participants were significantly slower to make the single-word judgement when the subject of the sentence was a conjoined NP (M = 917 ms) than when it was a singular NP (M = 826 ms) [t1(71) = 2.14, p = .018; t2(41) = 2.01, p = .025] or a plural definite description (M = 831 ms) [t1(71) = 2.57, p = .006; t2(41) = 3.43, p , .001]. There was no difference in number judgement times for the singular NP and plural definite description conditions, ps . .05. In the iterative conditions, there were no differences in judgement times based on subject type, all ps . .05. Additionally, the means in the iterative conditions

were not reliably different from the mean for conjoined NP in the punctual conjunction condition, all ps . .05.

Discussion As in Experiment 1, in Experiment 4 participants were faster to judge that a verb was a single word when it was interpreted as introducing a single punctual event rather than multiple iterative events. Importantly, this was only true when the subject of the sentence was a singular definite description or a plural definite description, not when the subject was a conjoined NP. Number judgements were slower when the punctual condition included a conjoined NP, replicating Experiment 3. Critically, Experiment 4 shows that this slowing was not due to a general increase in complexity associated with conjoined NPs, because there was no slowing associated with the conjoined NP in the iterative conditions. Instead, these findings are consistent with the argument that conjoined NP subjects spur comprehenders to build event representations that explicitly include subevents. It is also potentially informative


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that judgement times were so similar for the punctual conjoined NP condition and the three iterative conditions. This similarity is consistent with there being a relatively consistent cost for plural event interference in this paradigm.


GENERAL DISCUSSION The experiments reported in this paper are important for a number of reasons. First, they establish a valuable technique for probing the plurality of event representations as they are built during online comprehension. Second, they provide evidence against the idea that event representations are only built or fully specified at the conclusion of a semantically complete predicate. Third, they suggest that comprehenders tend to build a single group event when encountering an event with a plural agent, even when semantic cues from the verb weigh towards building multiple events. The data reported here show that Patson and Warren’s (2010) method can be used to investigate the time course of plural event specification during online language comprehension. Much previous work on plural events has focused on probing the final end product of event representations. For example, Patson and Warren probed the representation at the end of the sentence after the direct object had been introduced. Other researchers have relied on even more offline measures, such as anaphora, to probe event representations (e.g., Kurtzman & MacDonald, 1993). There is some work investigating event representations with online measures such as eyetracking, event-related potential (ERP), and magnetoencephalography (MEG; e.g., Brennan & Pylkkänen, 2008; Frazier et al., 1999). Although these experiments have garnered important insights into the representation of events, these measures are limited because they primarily measure the complexity of one event’s representation relative to another event’s. Plural events are not necessarily more complex than singular events (e.g., if they are left underspecified) and therefore do not always result in increased reading times compared to singular events (see Frazier et al., 1999). The method used in the

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experiments reported here is an important step forward for the investigation of plural events because it can be used to probe intermediate representations, and it directly indexes the plurality of the representation. Although these experiments use a dual-task method, participants still read sentences in an incremental manner. During the experiment, participants are primarily engaged in self-paced reading; only once during every sentence do they perform a number-of-words judgement task. This intermittent secondary task seems unlikely to interfere with participants’ incremental interpretation. The ability to probe intermediate representations is important because verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings and can shift throughout the course of a sentence (e.g., Getner & France, 1988). Getner and France (1988) argue that this is true because nouns serve to establish referents in the discourse, while verbs serve as predicates over those referents. Thus, according to Getner and France, nouns are more internally cohesive than verbs—a verb’s representation must adjust in order to achieve semantic coherence among all of the elements in the sentence (e.g., subjects, objects, quantifiers, modifiers). For example, modifiers can be used to coerce the meaning of a verb into an iterative representation (e.g., from our Experiment 1, All morning long the cart banged in the cramped store aisle.). But the referents in a sentence can also influence a verb’s interpretation. Consider Sentences 18 and 19 below: 18. 19.

John banged the gong. John banged on the front door.

In (18), the most likely interpretation is a single event, whereas in (19) an iterative event is more likely. However, those representations can be adjusted by modifiers. For example, the sentence in (18) can be shifted to an iterative meaning by the addition of the adverb “repeatedly”, while the sentence in (19) can be shifted to a single event by the addition of the adverb “once”. Intuitively, it stands to reason that the parser might not settle on an interpretation of the verb until the entire predicate was semantically complete, and



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Pickering and Frisson (2001) provided evidence that that is in fact the case. However, our data suggest that specification of event number information is part of the incremental interpretation of a sentence. We found evidence that multiple event representations had been created at the verb even though the entire predicate had not yet been completed. Still, it is important to note that we tested this possibility in the presence of sentence-initial quantifiers that disambiguated the number (singular vs. plural) of the events. Thus, seeing no delay in specification in our experiments does not mean that comprehenders might not delay in situations without such clear cues (as in Pickering & Frisson, 2001). Future work will investigate this possibility. Our data show that in many cases when a sentence specifies the plurality or singularity of events, comprehenders mentally represent that number information immediately. This was the case in Experiments 1a, 1b, 2, and 4. Although an explicit distributivity marker forced comprehenders to either build or focus multiple events in Experiment 2, distributivity conveyed within a verb’s meaning did not have the same effect in Experiment 3. As we described earlier, some inherently distributed verbs have an underspecified meaning that can apply to the group (e.g., ate can take on a “consumed” meaning). Even strongly distributed verbs, such as sleep, may be left underspecified. Consider the sentence in (20): 20.

The cats slept in the living room all afternoon.

This use of a plural head highlights the similarity of the sleeping events—in this case the events occurred at roughly the same time and in the same location. Our data suggest that comprehenders build an underspecified event representation in which there is a set of cats and some sleeping, but the mapping between them is not specified. This is consistent with Pickering and Frisson’s (2001) findings showing that potentially vague verbs are initially left underspecified. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the combination of a plural definite description and an

inherently distributive verb did not lead comprehenders to represent multiple events. However, comprehenders did represent multiple events when the verb was inherently distributive, and the subject was a conjoined NP. This clearly establishes a role for subject type, but raises the question of the role of the inherently distributive verb. Our data might suggest that inherently distributed verbs are sensitive to the accessibility of individuals in complex reference objects. Inherently distributed verbs contain information that specifies that their action must apply to an individual and not to a plural set. The availability of the individuals in the complex reference object introduced by the conjoined NP allows the action in the predicate to be directly applied to them, allowing comprehenders to build a highly specified representation of the sentence. When individuals are not accessible (e.g., when the subject is a plural definite description) the mapping between the action and the subject seems to be left underspecified. Future work will investigate how other predicate types combine with different types of plural subjects to further elucidate the role of accessible individuals in comprehension. Taken together, the current findings and previous findings regarding the mental representation of plural entities (Patson & Ferriera, 2009; Patson et al., 2014; Patson & Warren, 2010, 2011) suggest that when linguistic markers (e.g., quantifiers, the presence of a complex reference object, certain modifiers) make it clear that an event or entity must contain subevents or subentities, comprehenders mentally represent multiple substructures, and they build them incrementally. However, when verb semantics only strongly suggests the presence of subevents, and there are no explicitly introduced individuals to map those subevents to, comprehenders fail to build them and instead leave the representation underspecified.

Supplemental material Supplemental content is available via the “Supplemental” tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.976578).


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