12 December 2007, Logic, Language, and Reasoning Seminar, Robin Clark

We examine the understanding of sentences containing a single quantifier. Subjects were asked to make truth value judgments of a sentence relative to a model (the latter presented visually), where each sentence contained a single quantifier which could be an Aristotelean (e.g., "all", "some", "no"), a cardinal determiner ("at least n", where n > 0), a parity determiner (e.g., "an even/odd number of") or a majority determiner (e.g., "more than half"). The judgment marshalled parts of the parietal lobe normally associated with number processing; furthermore, a neuroanatomical difference was noted between first order and higher order quantifiers. Based on these observations, we compared different populations---corticobasal degeneration (CBD) patients, fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) patients and Alzheimers (AZ) patients---with respect to their behavior on various types of quantifiers. The results suggest that understanding of sentences containing quantifiers crucially involves number sense.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~szymanik/LLR.html