Conceptual representation of lexical and grammatical number: Evidence from SNARC and size congruity effect in the processing of Polish nouns

The goal of the present study was to investigate the numerical representation of the referents of collective singular nouns in comparison with non-collective singular and plural nouns. Specifically, we asked whether the representation of collective singulars is influenced by the grammatical number (singularity) or the lexical specification (plurality of collection elements). This question was addressed in two psycholinguistic experiments using a technique based on two number-related phenomena: the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect and the size congruity effect. Participants performed semantic (Experiment 1) or grammatical (Experiment 2) number judgments for collective and non-collective Polish nouns, while the response hand, grammatical number and font size of the words were manipulated. A weak SNARC effect was found in the form of faster responses for grammatically singular nouns with the left hand and for grammatically plural nouns with the right hand. Collective singulars patterned with non-collective singulars suggesting that the primary representation of collective referents does not include conceptual plurality. The numerical interpretation seems to be driven more by grammatical than lexical factors. The SNARC effect was present only in Experiment 1, which points to its dependence on the task type. No size congruity effect occurred in either experiment, so the size of the denoted set does not appear to be a salient property of the conceptual representation of linguistic number.