Natural languages like English connect pronunciations with meanings. Linguistic pronunciations can be described in ways that relate them to our motor system (e.g., to the movement of our lips and tongue). But how do linguistic meanings relate to our nonlinguistic cognitive systems? As a case study, we defend an explicit proposal about the meaning of most by comparing it to the closely related more: whereas more expresses a comparison between two independent subsets, most expresses a subset–superset comparison. Six experiments with adults and children demonstrate that these subtle differences between their meanings influence how participants organize and interrogate their visual world. In otherwise identical situations, changing the word from most to more affects preferences for picture–sentence matching (experiments 1–2), scene creation (experiments 3–4), memory for visual features (experiment 5), and accuracy on speeded truth judgments (experiment 6). These effects support the idea that the meanings of more and most are mental representations that provide detailed instructions to conceptual systems.

Knowlton, T., T. Hunter, D. Odic, A. Wellwood, J. Halberda, P. Pietroski, J. Lidz. (2021). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

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Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more considered judgment challenges the idea that we perceive sentences veridically, and interpret them fully. It is thus potentially revealing about the relationship between grammar and language processing. This paper presents the results of the first detailed investigation of these so-called 'comparative illusions'. We test four hypotheses about their source: a shallow syntactic parser, some type of repair by ellipsis, an incorrectly-resolved lexical ambiguity, or a persistent event comparison interpretation. Two formal acceptability studies show that speakers are most prone to the illusion when the matrix clause supports an event comparison reading. A verbatim recall task tests and finds evidence for such construals in speakers' recollections of the sentences. We suggest that this reflects speakers' entertaining an interpretation that is initially consistent with the sentence, but failing to notice when this interpretation becomes unavailable at the than-clause. In particular, semantic knowledge blinds people to an illicit operator-variable configuration in the syntax. Rather than illustrating processing in the absence of grammatical analysis, comparative illusions thus underscore the importance of syntactic and semantic rules in sentence processing.

Additional materials related to the published experiments and our preliminary experiments can be found on Github.

Wellwood, A., R. Pancheva, V. Hacquard, and C. Phillips. (2018). The anatomy of a comparative illusion. Journal of Semantics, 35(3).

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Semanticists often assume an ontology for natural language that includes not only ordinary objects, but also events, as well as other entities. We link this ontology to how speakers represent static and dynamic entities. Specifically, we test how speakers determine whether an entity counts as "atomic" by using count vs. mass (e.g., some gleebs, some gleeb) and distributive vs. non-distributive descriptions (e.g., gleeb every second or so, gleeb around a little). We then seek evidence for atomic representation in a non-linguistic task. Ultimately we suggest that natural language ontology reveals properties of language-independent conceptualization.

Wellwood, A., S. J. Hespos, and L. Rips. (2018). How similar are objects and events? Acta Linguistica.

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Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that the objects/events and substances/processes that nouns and verbs apply to are strongly parallel. We investigate whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which in turn underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. We hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural language (some gorps, for novel gorp) but not mass language (some gorp). We investigate the language-perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations designed to encourage atomicity ('natural' spatial and temporal breaks), versus those that should not ('unnatural' breaks). Testing preference for matching such stimuli with mass or count syntax, our results support Bach’s analogy in perception, and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.

Wellwood, A., S. J. Hespos, and L. Rips. (2018). The object : substance :: event : process analogy. In Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 2, Oxford University Press.

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Kotek et al. (2015) argue on the basis of novel experimental evidence that sentences like 'Most of the dots are blue' are ambiguous, i.e. have two distinct truth conditions. Kotek at al furthermore suggest that when their results are taken together with those of earlier work by Lidz et al. (2011), the overall picture that emerges casts doubt on the conclusions that Lidz et al. drew from their earlier results. We disagree with this characterization of the relationship between the two studies. Our main aim in this reply is to clarify the relationship as we see it. In our view, Kotek et al.'s central claims are simply logically independent of those of Lidz et al.: the former concern which truth condition(s) a certain kind of sentence has, while the latter concern the procedures that speakers choose for the purposes of determining whether a particular truth condition is satisfied in various scenes. The appearance of a conflict between the two studies stems from inattention to the distinction between questions about truth conditions and questions about verification procedures.

Hunter, T., J. Lidz, D. Odic, and A. Wellwood. (2017). On how verification tasks are related to verification procedures: a reply to Kotek et al. Natural Language Semantics, 25(2).

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Recent proposals in the semantics literature hold that the negative comparative less and negative adjectives like short in English are morphosyntactically complex, unlike their positive counterparts more and tall. For instance, the negative adjective short might decompose into little tall (Rullmann 1995; Heim 2006; Büring 2007; Heim 2008). Positing a silent little as part of adjectives like short correctly predicts that they are semantically opposite to tall; we seek evidence for this decomposition in language understanding in English and Polish. Our visual verification tasks compare processing of positive and negative comparatives with taller and shorter against that of arguably less symbolically-rich mathematical statements, A > B, B < A. We find that both language and math statements generally lead to monotonic increases in processing load along with the number of negative symbols (as predicted for language by e.g. Clark and Chase 1972). Our study is the first to examine the processing of the gradable predicates tall and short cross-linguistically, as well as in contrast to extensionally-equivalent, and putatively non-linguistic stimuli (cf. Deschamps et al. 2015 with quantificational determiners).

Tucker, D., B. Tomaszewicz and A. Wellwood. (2018). Decomposition and processing of negative adjectival comparatives. In The semantics of gradability, vagueness, and scale structure: Experimental perspectives, Cognition and Mind series.

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Questions about the nature of the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only recently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic investigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adopt a transparency thesis about the relationship between linguistic structure and extralinguistic cognition, investigating whether different lexico-syntactic structures can differentially recruit the visual causal percept. A prominent analysis of causative verbs like move suggests reference to two distinct events and a causal relationship between them, whereas non-causative verbs like push do not so refer. In our study, we present English speakers with simple scenes that either do or do not support the perception of a causal link, and manipulate (between subjects) a one-sentence instruction for the evaluation of the scene. Preliminary results suggest that competent speakers of English are more likely to judge causative constructions than non-causative constructions as true of a scene where causal features are present in the scene. Implications for a new approach to the investigation of linguistic meanings and future directions are discussed.

Vogel, C., A. Wellwood, R. Dudley, and J. B. Ritchie. (2013). Talking about causing events.The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication: Vol. 9.

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