To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…