Abstract
The scope of reference of a word's meaning can be highly variable. We present a novel paradigm to investigate the flexible interpretation of word meaning. We focus on quantifiers such as “many” or “few,” a class of words that depends on number knowledge but can be interpreted in a flexible manner. Healthy young adults performed a truth value judgment task on pictorial arrays of varying amounts of blue and yellow circles, deciding whether the sentence “Many/few of the circles are yellow” was an adequate description of the stimulus. The study consisted of two experiments, one focusing on “many,” one on “few.” Each experiment had three blocks. In a first “baseline” block, each individual's criterion for “many” and “few” was assessed. In a second “adaptation” block, subjects received feedback about their decisions that was different from their initial judgments in an effort to evaluate the flexibility of a subject's interpretation. A third “test” block assessed whether adaptation of quantifier meaning induced in block 2 then was generalized to alter a subject's baseline meaning for “many” and “few.” In Experiment 1, a proportion of yellow circles as small as 40% was reinforced as “many”; in Experiment 2, a proportion of yellow circles as large as 60% was reinforced as “few.” Subjects learned the new criterion for “many” in Experiment 1, which also affected their criterion for “few” although it had never been mentioned. Likewise, in Experiment 2, subjects changed their criterion for “few,” with a comparable effect on the criterion for “many” which was not mentioned. Thus, the meaning of relational quantifiers like “many” and “few” is flexible and can be adapted. Most importantly, adapting the criterion for one quantifier (e.g., “many”) also appeared to affect the reciprocal quantifier (in this case, “few”). Implications of this result for psychological interventions and for investigations of the neurobiology of the language-number interface are discussed.
Highlights
Humans are very efficient at processing quantities
In this study we investigated whether individuals can flexibly adapt their interpretation of quantifier meaning
The comparison between baseline and test phase, which were absolutely identical with respect to quantifiers, stimuli, and their pairings, revealed that the internal criterion for the second quantifier (“few”) had shifted it had not been mentioned in the adaptation phase
Summary
Humans are very efficient at processing quantities. Assessing and evaluating the number of desirable or potentially dangerous entities—chunks of food, precious artifacts, or deadly animals— happens in fractions of seconds. Aristotelian quantifiers (comprising existential quantifiers such as “all X are Y” and logical quantifiers like e.g., “some X are Y”) or majority quantifiers (“at least half of the X are Y”) refer to quantities in the environment in the absence of an explicitly defined number. We focus our study on quantifiers because we can and precisely measure the meaning of this class of word, even one that does not explicitly mention a number. This is because the meaning of a quantifier is derived in part from number knowledge—to varying degrees depending on the exact nature of the quantifier
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