Processing Grammatical and Notional Number Information in English and French
Creators: name: Carson, Robyn
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2018
Subjects: number
noun dominance
inflectional morphology
lexical decision
visual word recognition
number agreement
collective nouns
animacy

description: Number is a grammatical category found in nearly every language around the world (Corbett, 2000). The syntactic expression of number is referred to as grammatical number. In English and French, two number categories are in use: singular and plural. Nouns that are written more frequently in their singular form are called singular-dominant, while those that are written more frequently in their plural form are called plural-dominant. Several lexical decision and picture naming studies have found that grammatical number and noun dominance interact, resulting in a surface frequency effect for singular-dominant nouns only. Singular-dominant nouns are recognized/named significantly faster in their singular form than in their plural form, while plural-dominant nouns are recognized/named equally fast in both forms (e.g., Baayen, Burani, &amp; Schreuder, 1997; Biedermann, Beyersmann, Mason, &amp; Nickels, 2013; Domínguez, Cuetos, &amp; Segui, 1999; New, Brysbaert, Segui, Ferrand, &amp; Rastle, 2004; Reifegerste, Meyer, &amp; Zwitserlood, 2017). The objective of this thesis is to extend our understanding of the singular-dominant noun surface frequency effect in English and French by adopting three procedures. First, advanced linear mixed modelling techniques were used to improve statistical power and accuracy. Second, the noun dominance ratio technique (Reifegerste et al., 2017) was applied to investigate whether the surface frequency effect remains significant when noun dominance was treated as a continuous variable. Third, a determiner-noun number agreement task was created to determine whether the surface frequency effect could be reproduced in a novel task. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, two lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns while the noun dominance effect was non-significant. The interaction between grammatical number and noun dominance was significant in French and marginally so in English. The interaction pattern was identical in both languages, singular-dominant nouns demonstrated a surface frequency effect while plural nouns did not. In Study 2, three determiner-noun number agreement tasks (NATs) were conducted. Results revealed that in both English and French, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns. No other effects were significant. Incorporating irregular singular nouns (e.g., bonus) and plural nouns (e.g., mice) as foils produced the same results. In Study 3, two LDTs and one NAT were conducted. Lexical decision results revealed that in both English and French, singular nouns were recognized faster than plural nouns. However, the effects of noun collectivity and animacy were significant in English only; non-collective nouns were recognized faster than collective nouns while inanimate nouns were recognized faster than animate nouns. Number agreement results revealed that in English, plural nouns were recognized faster than singular nouns; no other effects reached significance. Taken together, my studies confirm that a strong surface frequency effect exists during visual word recognition for singular-dominant nouns. However, the surface frequency effect does not extend to the formation determiner-noun number agreement decisions, which were influenced nearly exclusively by grammatical number.