Cognitive Processing of Quantifiers

In this chapter, I set out to study the cognitive task of sentence verification. In particular, I investigate the cognitive capacity to recognize the truth-value of sentences with simple quantifiers (like ‘some’, ‘an even number of’, ‘more than 7’, ‘less than half’). As the exact strategies people use to verify quantifier sentences are mostly uncertain, I study optimal (computationally minimal) algorithms that can handle the tasks, i.e., semantic automata. I overview a number of cognitive science experiments on the processing of natural language quantifiers, which establish the psychological generality of the semantic automata model. The experiments include, behavioral measures of reaction times, accuracy, and working memory involvement, neurocognitive studies, experiments with schizophrenic patients, and linguistic analysis of quantifier distributions in corpora. The empirical data shows that the computational distinctions described in the previous chapter are reflected in human quant...