Person:

Feiman, Roman

Quantifier words like EACH, EVERY, ALL and THREE are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. ‘‘Every kid climbed a tree” could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences – those containing EVERY, as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants’ reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, ALL-A sentences prime other ALL-A sentences, while EACH-A primes EACH-A, but sentences with EACH do not prime sentences with ALL or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers – when one number (e.g. THREE) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. FOUR) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language.

The expressive power of human thought and language comes from the ability to systematically combine a finite vocabulary of concepts into a boundless number of meaningful thoughts. What properties of conceptual representations enable their combination? Three papers investigate different aspects of the combinatorial system in the context of a single general approach – taking logical concepts as a special case of concepts whose content is completely specified by their combinatorial properties. The first paper looks at infants’ ability to represent two types of goals: approach and avoid, where each goal-type could be represented as the negation of the other. Consistent with past literature, we find evidence of children representing approach at 7 month, but failing to represent avoid at both 7 and 14 months. This suggests that these children cannot combine their representation of approach with a negation operator, possibly because they do not yet have this operator. In the second paper, we continue to look at the emergence of logical negation through the relationship between the emergence of the concept and the words that label it. We find that, although 15-month-olds say the word “no”, they do not understand its logical meaning until 24 months. This is the same age at which they begin to produce the word “not”, comprehend its logical meaning, and use both “no” and “not” to deny the truth of others’ statements. This pattern of results suggest a common limiting factor on the mapping of any word to the concept of logical negation. This factor could be the emergence of the concept, or a linguistic limitation common to both “no” and “not”. The third paper looks at the properties of the combinatorial system in adults, taking linguistic quantifier scope ambiguity phenomena as a case study. Using a priming paradigm, we find evidence for independent combinatorial operations for the universal quantifiers EACH, EVERY and ALL, but common operations for the numbers THREE, FOUR and FIVE. We also find that the semantic operations that compose quantifier meanings abstract away from the verb and noun content of sentences. This suggests a division of labor in adult combinatorial thought, with conceptual content represented separately from the combinatorial properties of concepts.