comment

A Comment on a Neuroimaging Study of Natural†Language Quantier Comprehension‡Jakub SzymanikInstitute for Logic, Language, and ComputationUniversity of AmsterdamE-mail: szymanik@science.uva.nlPlantage Muidergracht 241018 TV AmsterdamThe Netherlands1 Neuroimaging dataResearch presented in this journal by McMillan et al. (2005) is the rstattempt to investigate the neural basis of natural language quanti ers (seealso McMillan et al. (2006) for evidence on quanti er comprehension in pa-tients with focal neurodegenerative disease and Clark and Grossman (2006)for more general discussion). It was devoted to study brain activity duringcomprehensionofsentenceswithgeneralizedquanti ers. UsingBOLDfMRItheauthorsexaminedthepatternofneuroanatomicalrecruitmentwhilesub-jectswerejudgingthetruth-valueofstatementscontainingnaturallanguagequanti ers. According to the authors their results verify a particular com-putational model of natural language quanti er comprehension posited byseveral linguists and logicians (e. g. see van Benthem, 1986). I challengeThe author would like to express his appreciation to Theo Janssen for comments onthe manuscript.†This research was supported by a Marie Curie Early Stage Research fellowship in theproject GloRiClass (MEST-CT-2005-020841).‡The author is a recipient of the 2006 Foundation for Polish Science Grant for YoungScientists.1this statement by invoking the computational di erence between rst-orderquanti ers and ...