title: Garlic and ginger are not like apples and oranges: Effects of mass/count information on the production of noun phrases in English.
abstract: In this study a picture-word interference paradigm was used to investigate how grammatical mass/count information is processed during noun phrase production in English. Theories of lexical processing distinguish between two different types of lexical-syntactic information: variable extrinsic lexical-syntactic features, such as number (singular, plural), and fixed intrinsic lexical-syntactic properties, such as grammatical gender (e.g., masculine, feminine). Previous research using the picture-word interference paradigm has found effects of distractor lexical-syntactic congruency for grammatical gender but no congruency effects for number. We used this phenomenon to investigate whether mass/count information is processed similarly to grammatical gender. In two experiments, participants named pictures of mass or count objects using determiner noun phrases (e.g., Experiment 1 with mass and plural count nouns: "not muchmassricemass", "not manycountpegscount"; Experiment 2 with mass and singular count nouns: "some ricemass", "a pegcount"), while ignoring distractors that were countability congruent or incongruent nouns. The results revealed a countability congruency effect for mass and plural count nouns in Experiment 1 and for singular count nouns, but not mass nouns in Experiment 2. This is similar to grammatical gender suggesting that countability processing is predominantly driven by a noun's lexical-syntactic information.
authors.affiliation: 1 Institut für Psychologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Berlin, Germany.|2 Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Nora
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fieder
authors.affiliation: 2 Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Lyndsey
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0311-3524
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nickels
authors.affiliation: 2 Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
authors.forename: Trudy
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Krajenbrink
authors.affiliation: 2 Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.|3 Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
authors.forename: Britta
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Biedermann
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001244:Association; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008433:Mathematics; D008875:Middle Aged; D009275:Names; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Countability; Language production; Lemma level; Lexical-syntax; Mass/count nouns