The mental representation of non-numerical quantifiers: The Spatial-Linguistic Association of Response Codes (SLARC) effect.

Abstract

How quantifiers are represented in the human mind is still a topic of intense debate. Seminal studies have addressed the issue of how a subclass of quantifiers, i.e. number words, is spatially coded displaying the SNARC (Spatial-numerical Association of Response Codes) effect; yet, none of these studies have explored the spatial representation of non-numerical quantifiers such as “some” or “many”. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether non-numerical quantifiers are spatially coded in the human mind. We administered two typical comparison tasks to 52 participants: the first task involved non-numerical quantifiers; the second task involved number words. Results showed a response-side compatibility effect for both number words and non-numerical quantifiers, suggesting that both types of quantifiers are encoded in a spatial format; quantifiers referring to “small” quantities are responded to faster with the left hand and quantifiers referring to “large” quantities are responded to faster with the right hand. We labeled this effect for non-numerical quantifiers as the SLARC (Spatial-Linguistic Association of Response Codes) effect. Notably, we found that the SNARC and the SLARC effects were strictly related to each other, namely more a participant was sensitive to the SNARC effect in the number word task, the more a SLARC effect was detectable in the non-numerical quantifier task. These findings add evidence to the tendency of humans to align magnitude information on a mental line that is coded from left to right. This article is in press in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.