Working Memory Mechanism in Proportional Quantifier Verification
- Marcin Zajenkowski,
- Jakub Szymanik,
- Maria Garraffa
- … show all 3 hide
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The paper explores the cognitive mechanisms involved in the verification of sentences with proportional quantifiers (e.g. “More than half of the dots are blue”). The first study shows that the verification of proportional sentences is more demanding than the verification of sentences such as: “There are seven blue and eight yellow dots”. The second study reveals that both types of sentences are correlated with memory storage, however, only proportional sentences are associated with the cognitive control. This result suggests that the cognitive mechanism underlying the verification of proportional quantifiers is crucially related to the integration process, in which an individual has to compare in memory the cardinalities of two sets. In the third study we find that the numerical distance between two cardinalities that must be compared significantly influences the verification time and accuracy. The results of our studies are discussed in the broader context of processing complex sentences.
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- Title
- Working Memory Mechanism in Proportional Quantifier Verification
- Journal
-
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
Volume 43, Issue 6 , pp 839-853
- Cover Date
- 2014-12-01
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10936-013-9281-3
- Print ISSN
- 0090-6905
- Online ISSN
- 1573-6555
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Keywords
-
- Quantifiers
- Computational complexity
- Approximate number sense
- Working memory
- Cognitive control
- Industry Sectors
- Authors
-
-
Marcin Zajenkowski
(1)
- Jakub Szymanik (2)
- Maria Garraffa (3)
-
Marcin Zajenkowski
- Author Affiliations
-
- 1. Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Stawki 5/7, 00-183 , Warsaw, Poland
- 2. Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 3. School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK