Talking about quantities in space: Vague quantifiers, context and similarity

Coventry, Kenny, Cangelosi, Angelo, Newstead, Stephen and Bugmann, Davi (2010) Talking about quantities in space: Vague quantifiers, context and similarity. Language and Cognition, 2 (2). pp. 221-241. ISSN 1866-9808

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Abstract

In this paper we examine how vague quantifiers, such as few, several, lots of, map onto non-linguistic number systems. In particular our focus is to examine how judgements about vague quantifiers are affected by the presence of objects in visual scenes other than those being referred to. An experiment is presented that manipulated the number of objects in a visual scene (men playing golf; the ‘focus’ objects) together with the number of other objects in those scenes and their similarity — in terms of form (women or crocodiles) and function (playing golf, not playing golf) — to the focus objects. We show that the number of other objects in a scene impacts upon quantifiers judgements even when those objects are in a different category to the focus objects. We discuss the results in terms of the mapping between the large approximate number (estimation) system and language

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	quantifiers, approximate number system, visual attention, context
Subjects:	C800 Psychology
Department:	Faculties > Health and Life Sciences > Psychology
Depositing User:	Ay Okpokam
Date Deposited:	08 Feb 2012 15:44
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2019 16:29
URI:	http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5281

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