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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Nov 4, 2025

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition

Published on: July 13, 2019

Linguistic meanings as cognitive instructions.

Tyler Knowlton¹, Tim Hunter², Darko Odic³

¹Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

|May 29, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The words "more" and "most" subtly alter how people process visual information. This study reveals how these linguistic meanings guide our cognitive systems and visual world organization.

Keywords:

language meaning psycholinguistics semantics vision

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics
Developmental Psychology

Background:

Natural languages link spoken sounds to meanings.
Linguistic meanings' connection to nonlinguistic cognitive systems is less understood.
The motor system can describe linguistic pronunciations.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose and defend a theory on the meaning of "most."
To compare the meaning of "most" to the related quantifier "more."
To investigate how these quantifiers influence visual world organization and interrogation.

Main Methods:

Six experiments were conducted with adults and children.
Participants' preferences for picture-sentence matching were assessed.
Scene creation, visual memory, and truth judgments were analyzed.

Main Results:

Subtle meaning differences between "more" and "most" significantly impacted cognitive tasks.
Changing "most" to "more" altered picture-sentence matching preferences.
Effects were observed in scene creation, visual memory, and speeded truth judgments.

Conclusions:

The meanings of "more" and "most" are mental representations.
These meanings provide detailed instructions to conceptual systems.
Linguistic meaning influences nonlinguistic cognitive processing.