Perceiving and communicating magnitudes Behavioral and electrophysiological studies

This thesis presents investigations of the cognitive and neuronal processes that take part in the comprehension and production of scalar adjectives such as ‘large’, ‘long’, ‘loud’, ‘quiet’ and quantifiers such as ‘many’, ‘few’, ‘most’. The main topic of this thesis (Chapters 2-4) concerns the potential relationship between processing mechanisms for scalar adjectives and natural language quantifiers (i.e. symbolic magnitudes) on the one hand, and processing mechanisms for the estimation and comparison of perceptually given (i.e. nonsymbolic) magnitudes such as quantity, length, duration from perceptual input on other other hand. Scalar adjectives and at least some natural language quantifiers can be seen as references to nonsymbolic magnitude representations. The potential relation of scalar adjectives and quantifiers with perceptual quantities is investigated by asking whether they are processed in a similar way as number symbols (such as Arabic digits, e.g., ‘3’, ‘5’, and number words, e.g., ‘three’, ‘five’), a symbolic magnitude representation whose interaction with nonsymbolic magnitude representations has already been a subject of extensive research in the past. In Chapter 5 the scope of the thesis is expanded to an investigation of neuronal activity during composition of scalar adjectives and nouns.