On Understanding Logically Complex Sentences

Abstract

An experimental investigation was made into the meaning of eight types of doubly-quantified sentence, e.g. “Every medicine cures some disease,” “Some disease is cured by every medicine.” All the sentences were ambiguous, depending upon the interpretation of the quantifiers. Subjects classified diagrams representing different specific situations as truthfully or falsely described by the sentences. The classifications revealed that the order of occurrence of the two quantifiers had a crucial effect, causing active and correlative passive to receive different interpretations. This suggested that in the process of understanding an ambiguous sentence a bias towards one intepretation may be created by word order.