Jakub Szymanik. Generalized Quantifier Theory Meets Cognition

Non-human animals are able to count and represent quantities, but reasoning with linguistic expressions of (relative) quantities (known as quantifiers) seems a uniquely human ability. Humans can understand, for example, sentences such as “Most linguists are logicians”, “Less than half of the cognitive neuroscientists are computer scientists”, and “At least 3 of the applicants are psychologists.” Humans can also assess the conditions that make such sentences true or false. In the course we will survey the cognitive bases of quantifier processing. Especially, we will focus on monotonicity/negativity influence on reasoning with quantifiers and computational complexity interplay with “difficulty” as experienced by subjects asked to verify quantifier sentences. To achieve this we will combine classical generalized quantifier theory (linguistics and mathematics) with newer generalized quantifier theory (computation and cognition)

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