Linguistic meanings as cognitive instructions

Abstract

Natural languages like English connect pronunciations with meanings. Linguistic pronunciations can be described in ways that relate them to our motor system (e.g., to the movement of our lips and tongue). But how do linguistic meanings relate to our nonlinguistic cognitive systems? As a case study, we defend an explicit proposal about the meaning of most by comparing it to the closely related more: whereas more expresses a comparison between two independent subsets, most expresses a subset-superset comparison. Six experiments with adults and children demonstrate that these subtle differences between their meanings influence how participants organize and interrogate their visual world. In otherwise identical situations, changing the word from most to more affects preferences for picture-sentence matching (experiments 1-2), scene creation (experiments 3-4), memory for visual features (experiment 5), and accuracy on speeded truth judgments (experiment 6). These effects support the idea that the meanings of more and most are mental representations that provide detailed instructions to conceptual systems.

Questions About Quantifiers: Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Quantity Processing by the Brain

“…8 Cf. with experiments in Knowlton et al (2021), some of which did not involve time pressure, and hence strengthen the original interpretation of the results. 9 While the authors do not explicitly mention that the order of presentation of trials with different quantifiers was randomized, this is implicit in the arguments that they make in the paper.…”

The computational and the representational language-of-thought hypotheses

“…Specifically, given a formal characterization w of the meaning of sentence S, we can probe whether people are biased to make use of the information explicitly called for in w. The most striking findings of this research are that English speakers are indeed remarkably uniform in the information they recruit to evaluate a sentence like Most As are Bs, and they are pretty stubborn in those preferences even when other strategies are readily available (Hackl, 2009), more accurate (Pietroski, Lidz, Hunter, & Halberda, 2009), or more extensible (Lidz, Pietroski, Halberda, & Hunter, 2011). Furthermore, these findings replicate for speakers evaluating translational equivalents in Polish (Tomaszewicz, 2011), and they are systematically different from those recruited for sentences with more under extensionally equivalent circumstances (e.g., Knowlton et al, 2021).…”

Linguistic meanings in mind

“…The most striking findings of this research are that English speakers are indeed remarkably uniform in the information they recruit to evaluate a sentence like Most As are Bs , and they are pretty stubborn in those preferences even when other strategies are readily available (Hackl, 2009), more accurate (Pietroski, Lidz, Hunter, & Halberda, 2009), or more extensible (Lidz, Pietroski, Halberda, & Hunter, 2011). Furthermore, these findings replicate for speakers evaluating translational equivalents in Polish (Tomaszewicz, 2011), and they are systematically different from those recruited for sentences with more under extensionally equivalent circumstances (e.g., Knowlton et al, 2021).…”