Probabilistic semantic automata in the verification of quantified statements

Strategies used by people to verify quantified sentences, like ‘Most cars are white’, have been a popular research topic on the intersection of linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and psychology. A prominent computational model of the task, semantic automata, has been introduced by van Benthem in 1983. In this paper we present a probabilistic extension of the model. We show that the model explains counting errors in the verification process. Furthermore, we observe that the variation in quantifier verification data cannot be explained by Approximate Number Sense, a prominent approach to probabilistic number estimation