Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 61801-2300, USA.
Cognition. 2013 Aug;128(2):149-69. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.03.009. Epub 2013 May 13.
Both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces variations in agreement (Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). These agreement variations are open to competing notional and lexical-grammatical number accounts. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number agreement reflect differences in referential coherence: More coherence yields more singularity. The lexical-grammatical hypothesis is that changes in agreement arise from competition between nouns differing in grammatical number: More competition yields more plurality. These hypotheses make opposing predictions about semantic integration. On the notional hypothesis, semantic integration promotes singular agreement. On the lexical-grammatical hypothesis, semantic integration promotes plural agreement. We tested these hypotheses with agreement elicitation tasks in two experiments. Both experiments supported the notional hypothesis, with semantic integration creating faster and more frequent singular agreement. This implies that referential coherence mediates the effect of semantic integration on number agreement.
概念和语法数都会影响语言生成中的一致性。为了探究它们的作用机制，我们研究了语义整合（一种概念相关性）如何产生一致性的变化（Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004）。这些一致性的变化可以用概念和词汇语法数的不同解释来解释。概念假设是，一致性变化反映了指称连贯性的差异：更高的连贯性产生更高的单一性。词汇语法假设是，一致性的变化是由语法数不同的名词之间的竞争引起的：更多的竞争产生更多的复数。这些假设对语义整合有相反的预测。根据概念假设，语义整合促进单数一致性。根据词汇语法假设，语义整合促进复数一致性。我们通过两个实验中的一致性启发任务来检验这些假设。两个实验都支持概念假设，即语义整合会产生更快、更频繁的单数一致性。这意味着指称连贯性调节了语义整合对数字一致性的影响。
