Most (but not all) quantifiers are interpreted immediately in visual context

ABSTRACT

The present ERP study used picture-sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of online semantic processing. We examined the effects of positive and negative polarity on the N400 in sentences containing the quantifiers more than half and fewer than half. Contrary to previous studies, we examined logical-semantic processes independently of lexical associations and world knowledge, and we used materials that were balanced with respect to the formal-semantic properties of polar quantifiers. Using picture-sentence verification, we examined the N400 at different sentence positions and thus controlled for contextual properties and predictability across the sentence. Our findings replicate delayed effects associated with negative quantifiers: For positive quantifiers, the truth-evaluation process had an immediate effect on the N400 across the sentence, while no incremental effects were found for negative quantifiers. Our results are compatible with predictive approaches suggesting that the increased semantic complexity of negative quantifiers affects the processing of later sentence regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Event-related potentials
• N400
• language comprehension
• quantifier processing
• picture-sentence verification

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG, German Research Foundation), project B1 of the SFB833 The Construction of Meaning – Project-ID 75650358. We thank Maïwenn Fleigg, Anna Hänle and Isabel Weber for invaluable assistance in data preparation and acquisition, and the participants of the ZAS Workshop The pragmatics of quantifiers: implicatures and presuppositions – experiment and theory, for valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that positive and negative quantifiers also differ from each other along further dimensions, such as monotonicity (Agmon et al., 2019), or the so-called empty-set property (Bott et al., 2019). These notions are not necessarily in a one-to-one-correspondence to polarity and can sometimes have differential effects on processing. Throughout this article, we use the notion polarity to distinguish between positive and negative quantifiers in general.

2 In order to control for the predictability of an upcoming restrictive clause, the punctuation following the adjective (i.e. the full-stop for the short filler sentences, and the comma for the long experimental sentences) was presented as a separate segment (see also Section 2.1.3).

3 We assume that this updating mechanism consists in the pruning of semantically incompatible sentences continuations and subsequent reweighting of the remaining options according to their associated prior probabilities (cf. Lassiter & Goodman, 2017, section 2.3, who refer to Stalnaker, 1978).

4 Note that the expectancies for the alternative colours (e.g. red for more than half) are not completely zero on the position of colour adjective, as a sentence containing red can still result in a true outcome at a later position, for instance, by a following restriction as in the present study, in which a relative clause follows.

5 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 75650358 – SFB 833, project B1.