Number in the Mental Lexicon

Abstract

This chapter discusses the representation and processing of grammatical number in language comprehension and production. Grammatical number is regarded as a syntactic feature stored with a word's lemma, i.e. the syntactic word, in the mental lexicon. The chapter discusses the representation of grammatical number in the mental lexicon and how this feature is selected. Comparisons to other grammatical features, such as grammatical gender, are also made. Moreover, the chapter reviews experimental work both in the area of language comprehension and language production to shed light on the processing of grammatical number in human cognition. The chapter closes with a report on recent experimental work conducted on Konso, a Cushitic language spoken in the south of Ethiopia. In Konso, the number feature interacts with the gender feature. Data from picture-naming experiments demonstrate that so-called plural gender should be interpreted as a gender feature rather than as a number feature.