Most (but not all) quantifiers are interpreted immediately in visual context

The present ERP study used picture-sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of online semantic processing. We examined the effects of positive and negative polarity on the N400 in sentences containing the quantifiers <i>more than half</i> and <i>fewer than half</i>. Contrary to previous studies, we examined logical-semantic processes independently of lexical associations and world knowledge, and we used materials that were balanced with respect to the formal-semantic properties of polar quantifiers. Using picture-sentence verification, we examined the N400 at different sentence positions and thus controlled for contextual properties and predictability across the sentence. Our findings replicate delayed effects associated with negative quantifiers: For positive quantifiers, the truth-evaluation process had an immediate effect on the N400 across the sentence, while no incremental effects were found for negative quantifiers. Our results are compatible with predictive approaches suggesting that the increased semantic complexity of negative quantifiers affects the processing of later sentence regions.