This paper reports the results of two experiments that investigate the nature of plural conceptual representations that are created during sentence comprehension. Previous work has found that comprehenders seem to represent both a singular object and a plural set of objects during the comprehension of plural nouns. The activation of the singular object has been attributed to the pragmatic processing involved in understanding the plural (Patson, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42, 1140–1153, 2016a). The goal of the current study was to further investigate this hypothesis. Experiment 1 used a picture-matching paradigm to investigate how comprehenders conceptualize plural nouns quantified with many, which renders the scalar implicature unnecessary. Consistent with the pragmatic processing hypothesis, comprehenders did not activate a singular form when the plural was quantified with many. Experiment 2 was designed to further investigate whether all quantifiers block activation of the singular form. The same picture-matching paradigm was used with numerical quantifiers that specify numbers either within or above the subitization range. When the number was within the subitization range, comprehenders’ conceptual representations contained exactly that number of objects, and importantly did not contain a singular object. When number was above the subitization range, comprehenders’ conceptual representations did not contain an exact number of objects and seemed to activate a singular object. These data are consistent with constraints on how many objects can be represented in visual working memory. Taken together, the results of these two experiments suggest that the plural’s conceptual representation emerged as a result of grammatical processing as well as limits on the visual processing system.

本文报告了两个实验的结果，这些实验研究了在句子理解过程中创建的多个概念表示的性质。先前的工作发现，在理解多个名词的过程中，理解器似乎既代表单数对象又代表多个对象集。单数对象的激活被归因于参与理解复数的语用处理（Patson，《实验心理学杂志：学习，记忆与认知》，第42卷，第1140–1153页，2016a）。当前研究的目的是进一步研究该假设。实验1中的图片匹配范式来研究如何comprehenders概念化复数名词用量化的许多，因此不需要标量含义。与务实处理假设一致，comprehenders没有激活单数形式时，多用量化很多。实验2旨在进一步研究所有量词是否都阻止了单数形式的激活。相同的图片匹配范例与数字量词一起使用，这些数字量词指定了在subitization范围之内或之上的数字。当数字在subitization范围内时，理解者的概念表示恰好包含该数量的对象，重要的是不包含单个对象。当数字超出细分范围时，理解者的概念表示不包含确切数目的对象，并且似乎激活了单个对象。这些数据与视觉工作内存中可以表示多少个对象的约束条件一致。在一起