Evidence from off-line sentence completion tasks suggests that collective nouns (grammatically singular but denoting multiple entities, e.g. cutlery) are viewed as being "more plural" than simple singulars. Employing a reaction time paradigm previously successful in distinguishing between singular and plural nouns, we investigated whether the conceptual plurality of collectives was accessed during on-line reading. While the results of our first experiment were inconclusive due to the expected differences between singulars and plurals not being found, those differences showed in Experiment 2 with collectives patterning like plurals. We interpret those latter results as evidence that the conceptual plurality of collectives is cognitively represented during language comprehension.