The Specification of Plurals

The experiments in this dissertation investigate factors that influence the level of detail within plural mental representations. The first chapter focuses on properties of noun phrases and event structure that allow comprehenders to create a highly specified plural mental representation (i.e., a representation in which the individuals that make up a plural are represented distinctly) from a previously underspecified plural mental representation. The second chapter in this dissertation focuses on properties of the sentential context that influence comprehenders' mental representations of plural predicates. In contrast to traditional theories of plural mental representations, which have argued that plurals are left underspecified during comprehension (Johnson-Laird, 1983), these data indicate that oftentimes plurals are not left underspecified, but have highly specified mental representations. The experiments in this dissertation show that syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors influence the degree of specification of plural mental representations. These findings have important consequences for theories of underspecification and theories of mental representations during sentence comprehension