My research focuses on adult language comprehension. I am particularly interested in how language comprehenders compute meaning from linguistic content. My research has focused on the conceptual representation of plurals. For example, consider the sentence "The cats slept on the rug." When a comprehender hears this sentence, what conceptual representation is built for "cats"? The plural referent cats could be left underspecified and represented as a single, non-differentiated group or it could be fully specified and thus represented as a set of differentiated cats. My work is informed by formal linguistics as well as cognitive psychology.

Selected Publications

Patson, N.D. (2016). Evidence in support of a scalar implicature account of plurality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42, 1140-1153.

Patson, N.D., and Husband, E.M. (2015). Misinterpretation in agreement and agreement attraction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69, 950-971.

Patson, N.D., and Warren, T. (2015). The mental representation of plural events. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 1249-1267.

Patson, N.D. (2014). The processing of plural expressions. Language and Linguistics Compass, 8, 319-329.

Patson, N.D., George, G.E., and Warren, T. (2014). The conceptual representation of number. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68. 1349-1365.

Patson, N.D., and Warren, T. (2011). Building complex reference objects from dual sets. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 443-459.