Gulgowski, P.
Uniwersytet Wroclawski
In my talk I would like to present the results of a study which tested experimentally the processing of the grammatical number of Polish nouns. The experiment used a technique introduced by Berent et al. (2005) based on a Stroop-like interference between the automatic extraction of semantic number from singular and plural nouns and the assessment of the numerosity of visually presented words. The current results provide more evidence that the ability to count visually presented nouns can be affected by their grammatical number. With respect to number-neutral control items, singular nouns were more difficult to count when visually double (incongruence between visual and grammatical number). Plural nouns did not differ significantly from the neutral condition. This pattern of interference contrasts with the findings reported by Berent et al. (2005) for Hebrew, where the performance of the counting task was affected for grammatically plural, but not singular, nouns in comparison to the number-neutral condition. This suggests interesting cross-linguistic differences in the mechanisms of automatic extraction of number values from word forms. Additionally, properties of Polish nominal morphology allowed me to investigate the possible influence of the presence or absence of an overt number-related nominal suffix on number processing.