Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do linguistic representations of magnitude (e.g., few, many, cold, hot) share the same spatial architecture as numerical quantities? While the Spatial–Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect shows that numbers are automatically mapped onto a mental number line, it remains unclear whether linguistic magnitudes elicit similar automatic spatial associations. We conducted three experiments to address this issue. Experiment 1 showed that Italian quantifiers and adjectives are explicitly mapped onto a horizontally compressed scale. Experiment 2 found no evidence for an implicit Spatial–Linguistic Association of Response Codes (SLARC) effect, with Bayesian analysis providing strong support for the null hypothesis (BF01=87). Experiment 3 confirmed robust SNARC and ratio effects for Arabic digits in the same participant pool. Together, these findings indicate that although linguistic and numerical magnitudes share a similar psychophysical structure, spatial mapping in language may be task-dependent and lack the automaticity observed in numerical cognition.