Semantics and visual cognition: the processing of Bulgarian and Polish majority quantifiers

Abstract

I provide experimental evidence that quantifier semantics is transparently associated with a canonical verification strategy (Lidz et al. 2011). I tested the processing of two majority quantifiers in Bulgarian and Polish: Most1, the counterpart of English most, and Most2, meaning "the largest subset". Three notable results have been obtained: (i) Most1 is verified by a Subtraction strategy, directly replicating the findings of Lidz et al. for Slavic; (ii) Most2 is verified by a Selection strategy in accordance with its lexical semantics; (iii) the canonical verification strategies are used even in cases where either strategy would yield the correct truth value.