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Abstract
One aspect of natural language comprehension is understanding how many of what or whom. While previous work has documented the neural correlates of number comprehension and quantity comparison, we investigate semantic number from a cross-linguistic perspective with the goal of identifying cortical regions involved in distinguishing plural from singular nouns. We use two fMRI datasets in which Chinese and French native speakers listen to an audiobook of a children’s story in their native language, selecting these two languages because they differ in their semantics. While Chinese nominals lack pluralization, French nouns are overtly marked for number. We find a number of known semantic regions in common in which cortical activation is greater for plural than singular nouns and posit a cross-linguistic role for number in semantic composition, the process by which individual concepts are combined to form complex meaning.