A Psychological Investigation of the Use and Interpretation of English Quantifiers

The work in this thesis is an investigation of quantifiers as they are used and interpreted in everyday language. Attention in the present work is paid to problems of proportion and emphasis, rather than to questions of the scope of quantifiers, which must account for a great deal of the literature on quantification in language. The literature reviews are accordingly restricted and do not address the question of scope. Experiments 1 to 5 are designed to answer questions about the way in which quantifiers relate to amounts or proportions. Experiment 1, in which subjects were invited to describe things in proportional terms, provides a large corpus of quantifiers and the proportions they are used to describe. Experiments 2 to 5 explore the effect of prior expectations on the meaning of quantifiers, and the effects of the use of quantifiers on the proportion which the speaker is believed to expect. These studies show that the proportions denoted by any one quantifier are influenced little, if at all, by prior expectations, a somewhat surprising finding. However, quantifiers do have various effects on the proportion which subjects believe the speaker to have expected in the situation she is describing. The second part of the thesis, and experiments 6 to 8, consider certain aspects of the meanings of quantifiers which are not related to amounts or proportions. Particular attention is paid to the way in which quantifiers can emphasise different subsets of the set which follows them in a piece of discourse. These differences in emphasis are assessed using a sentence continuation method. They are related to the idea of 'focus' which is used in later chapters. Finally, a computer program is used to illustrate one possible process which allows the various aspects of quantifier meanings to be assigned interpretation. The program, like the empirical studies, aims to discover and describe the effects of various quantifiers as they are used by human language users in descriptions of simple situations

Processing quantified noun phrases with numbers versus verbal quantifiers

Statements containing quantity information are commonplace. Although there is literature explaining the way in which quantities themselves are conveyed in numbers or words (e.g., many, probably), there is less on the effects of different types of quantity description on the processing of surrounding text. Given that quantity information is usually conveyed to alter our understanding of a situation (e.g., to convey information about a risk), our understanding of the rest of the quantified statement is clearly important. In this article texts containing quantified statements expressed numerically versus verbally are compared in two text change experiments to assess how the entire quantified noun phrase is encoded in each case. On the basis of the results it is argued that numerical quantifiers place focus on the size of a subset, whereas verbal quantifiers are better integrated with nouns leading to more focus on the subset itself

Negation in context: evidence from the visual world paradigm

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated

Irony as a Test of the Presupposition-Denial Account: An ERP Study

According to the Presupposition-Denial Account, complement set reference arises when focus is on the shortfall between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a larger, expected amount. Negative quantifiers imply a shortfall, through the denial of a presupposition, whereas positive quantifiers do not. An exception may be provided by irony. One function of irony is to highlight, through indirect negation, the shortfall between what is expected/desired, and what is observed. Thus, a positive quantifier used ironically should also lead to a shortfall and license complement set reference. Using ERPs, we examined whether reference to the complement set is more felicitous following a positive quantifier used ironically than one used non-ironically. ERPs during reading showed a smaller N400 for complement set reference following an ironic compared to a non-ironic context. The shortfall generated thorough irony is sufficient to allow focus on the complement set, supporting the Presupposition-Denial Account

The Presupposition-Denial Theory of Complement Set focus

Words like "few" and "many" denote different quantities of things. Previous experiments have shown that different quantity expressions also lead us to think in very different ways about the quantity being conveyed. For example "few" and "a few" convey similar quantities yet "few people die after this medical intervention" may persuade a patient to agree to the procedure while "a few people die after this medical intervention" would not. Previous experiments have shown that quantity expressions have important effects on the inferences we make, and that this is modified by the introduction of a character with expectations about the quantity being described. This research will show whether: expectations which are held by readers themselves; the desirability of the quantity conveyed, can modify the inference patterns following quantity expressions. In addition we will use an eye tracker to monitor participants eye movements while reading quantity statements. This will allow us to assess where problems arise in understanding the text as it is read and to observe where participants seek solutions to those problems (by means of looking back in the text to words which have already been processed)

Perspective in statements of quantity, with implications for consumer psychology

We demonstrate that presentation of information about quantities, whether expressed in natural language or by using numbers, induces a perspective that influences subsequent processing. Experiment 1 shows this to be true for natural language quantifiers, with negative and positive expressions inducing different perspectives. In Experiment 2, we examined the application of this idea to the specific case of perspectives induced by describing products as containing x% fat or as being x% fat free. We found that the percentage-fat description appears to induce a perspective that is sensitive to the level of fat being depicted, with products being judged as less healthy at higher amounts of fat. However, this effect was lessened (Experiment 2) or eliminated (Experiment 3) with the percentage-fat-free description. The experiments suggest the fat-free perspective blocks access to assumptions about healthy fat levels