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F. Franzon*# G.Arcara# M.L Riso° C. Zanini*# University of Padova *department of Language and Literature Studies DiSLL #department of Neuroscience DNS °department of General Psychology DPG
[email protected] [email protected]
introduction Following traditional grammar descriptions: MASS NOUNS blood
COUNT NOUNS ring
Are mass nouns really different from count nouns? evidence from a lexical decision study
LEXICAL DECISION STUDIES
CORPUS-BASED STUDIES
OUR STUDY
Longer RTs for mass nouns than for count
(Katz & Zamparelli 2012; Kulkarni et al.
The results in previous lexical decision
nouns.(i.e. Mondini et al. 2009; Gillon et al.
2013; Zanini et al. 2014)
studies could stem from a frequency effect
Nouns appear to be distributed along a
rather than from an effect due to a lexical/ semantic feature of nouns.
1999) It has been proposed that an additional
stuff non-individual uncountable singular only
things individuals countable singular and plural
feature has to be computed for mass nouns. A polar distribution should be expected on
Run a lexical decision task having con-
- mass nouns can appear in the plural.
subjective frequency.
trolled the items for corpus frequency and
methods
PARTICIPANTS 60 Italian native speakers (M = 24): mean age 23.5 (SD = 2.37); mean education 15.16 (SD =1.64). LEXICAL DECISION TASK Participants saw a series of letter strings presented at the center of the screen one at a time and they had to decide as quickly and accurately as possible whether or not each string was an Italian word. Fixation point: 500 ms on a dark gray background—target stimulus: until response, max 2000 ms—inter-stimulus-interval (blank screen): 830 ms.
160 experimental items,= 80 nouns, both in the singular and in the plural, including nouns that in previous studies would be included as mass (i.e. sangue ‘blood’), was included in the experimental list both in the singular and in the plural (i.e. sangui ‘bloods’). 240 fillers: 80 adjectives (40 in the singular and 40 in the plural); 160 phonotactically plausible non-words (80 ended with a letter that in Italian typically marks the singular form, 80 had a plural-like ending letters).
Results were analysed by means of mixed effect
Experimental items were controlled for: (I) ORTHOGRAPHIC LENGTH
nouns used as mass = mass frequency > count frequency nouns used as count = count frequency > mass frequency. - From the 80 nouns: 18 top mass-used nouns with the highest mass frequencies and values of count frequencies that were not among the top 18; 18 top count-used nouns with the highest count frequencies and values of mass frequencies that were not among the top 18. The nouns obtained in this way were used both in the singular and in the plural (totally 72). The remaining stimuli could not be strictly categorised in such terms. Number of stimuli
Corpus Frequency
Subjective Frequency
Length
72
11850.32 (27239.65)
3.29 (1.18)
6.41 (1.66)
SINGULAR
18
26204.88 (28831.43)
4.36 (0.57)
6.22 (1.89)
PLURAL
18
824 (1187.38)
1.95 (0.72)
6.28 (1.96)
SINGULAR
18
38570.05 (54194.95)
4.09 (0.84)
5.78 (1.31)
PLURAL
18
24365 (36455)
4.07 (0.80)
5.89 (1.27)
All stimuli
results
models (Baayen, Davidson & Bates 2008).
(II) SUBJECTIVE FREQUENCY by means of a dedicated rating study (Zanini et al. 2014). - 126 participants rated 224 concrete nouns both in the singular and in the plural (totally 448 items) - 7-point Likert scale 0 =“never heard or seen” to 6 = “I hear or see this word more than once a day” (III) CORPUS FREQUENCY based on the corpus ItWaC (Baroni et al. 2009). - From the initial list of 224 nouns, 80 nouns, both in the singular and in the plural, were selected (totally 160 stimuli). These stimuli were selected to span as uniformly as possible across the range of possible values of subjective frequency in order to use the subjective frequency as a continuous variable in the analysis. - For a comparison with previous studies, stimuli were categorized as mass-used or count-used by means of a corpus-based approach in order to avoid arbitrary experimenter choices.
Nouns mostly used as COUNT
- it is very common that a noun can be used both as mass or as count;
the basis of the mass-count distinction, BUT…
materials
Nouns mostly used as MASS
continuum:
References: Baayen R.H. , Davidson, D.J., Bates D.M. (2008) MIxed-effect modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and i-
tems. Journal of Memory and Language 59, 390-412. Baroni, M., Bernardini, S., Ferraresi, A., and Zanchetta, E. (2009). The WaCky Wide Web: A Collection of Very Large Linguistically Processed Web-Crawled Corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation 43 (3): 209-226.Gillon, B., Kehayia, E., & Taler, V. (1999). The mass/count distinction: Evidence from on-line psycholinguistic performance. Brain and Language 68, 205-211.— Kulkarni, R., Rothstein, S., & Treves, A. (2013). A statistical investigation into the cross-linguistics distribution of mass and count nouns: Morphosyntactic and semantic perspective. Biolinguistics, 7, 132-168.— Mondini, S., Kehaya, E., Gillon, B., Arcara, G., & Jarema, G. (2009). Lexical access of mass and count nouns. How word recognition reaction times correlate with lexical and morpho-syntactic processing. The Mental Lexicon 4, 354-379.—Katz, G. & Zamparelli, R. (2012). Quantifying Count/Mass Elasticity. Choi, J. et al. (eds). Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 371-379.—Zanini, C., Arcara, G., & Franzon, F. (2014). Measuring the distribution of mass and count nouns. A comparison between a rating study and a corpus based analysis. Talk presented at PALC 9. Łódź, Poland, 20-22/11/2014
MODEL 1 (72 stimuli; category = mostly mass/ mostly count, Number = singular/plural) - No RTs differences between mass singular and count singular. - In the plural, mass stimuli elicited longer RTs MODEL 2 (72 stimuli; category, Number, corpus frequency, subjective frequency and length) - Length correlates positively with RTs - Plural stimuli in all conditions elicited longer RTs - Subjective frequency correlates negatively with RTs
Slower RTs for mass nouns in the plural may be explained by assuming a subjective frequency effect
MODEL 3 (all 160 stimuli; Number, corpus frequency, subjective frequency, length). - Length correlates positively with RTs - Subjective frequency correlates negatively with RTs - Corpus frequency correlates negatively with RTs - No significant effect of Number
discussion and conclusions (i) Results of the previous studies were not replicated when performing a stricter control on the selection of the stimuli longer RTs in mass nouns as compared to count nouns were not replicated; longer RTs for the plural form of nouns used mostly as mass disappeared when taking into account the subjective frequency. (ii) Frequency effect may be taken into wider consideration in designing experimental tasks on the mass-count distinction. (iii) The mass-count distinction found in the previous literature is better accounted for as a frequency effect and not as differences in lexical representation.
