Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Newstead (1989) reports both graphically and sententially elicited data on the interpretation of quantifiers by logically naive undergraduate students. The sentential elicitation method fails to make the critical distinction between entailment relations between sentences, and mith-value-in-a-model relations between sentences and diagrams. The present study modifies the elicitation technique and shows that die resulting sen?tential data can be insightftiUy described in terms of broad ten?dencies of response (to over- or under-infer) interacting with highly specific grammatical sU^ctures (subject/predicate rela?tionship). The resulting categorisation of subjects into four groups is then predictive of graphically elicited behaviour These results are interpreted by conu-asting expository and deductive discourse, and proposing that students initially assimilate the latter to the former