Referential Numerosity and Morphosyntactic Number Agreement: A Psycholinguistic Study on Italian qualche/alcuni

The present study aims at shedding new light on the relationship between morphological Number and the numerosity of the referent(s). Previous studies exploiting agreement violations suggested a possible involvement of numerosity processing in the encoding of morphological Number (Carreiras et al., 2010). By employing the two Italian quantifiers qualche and alcuni, and exploiting their diverging requirements for Number agreement, we developed a picture–phrase matching paradigm. This minimal pair enabled us to test the hypothesis that when the morphological information of Number is incongruent with the numerosity encoded on the whole expression, more processing time is needed. The results are consistent with previous studies, and add evidence to a relationship between certain aspects of language and numerical cognition. Notably, contrary to previous literature, our results were obtained by exploiting well-formed expressions only.