Plural priming revisited: inverse preference and spillover effects

Abstract

Maldonado et al. (2017) observe that the distributive interpretation of sentences involving multiple plural expressions gives rise to stronger priming effects than their cumulative interpretation, and propose to interpret this observation in terms of structural priming of the phonologically silent distributivity operator. We report on a new experiment that included an additional ‘neutral’ baseline condition, whose results reveal that (i) the observed priming effects are inverse preference effects in that only the less dominant reading in the baseline condition gives rise to sizable priming effects, and (ii) both distributive and cumulative interpretations can have priming effects, depending on speakers’ baseline preferences. We argue that these findings undermine Maldonado et al.’s claim that their results evidence the existence of the silent distributivity operator in syntax.