Abstract

The verification of a sentence against a visual display in experimental conditions reveals a procedure that is driven solely by the properties of the linguistic input and not by the properties of the context (the set-up of the visual display) or extra-linguistic cognition (operations executed to obtain the truth value). This procedure, according to the Interface Transparency Thesis (ITT) (Lidz et al. in Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011), represents the meaning of an expression at the interface with the ‘conceptual-intentional’ system (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995). My experiments provide support for the ITT by replicating in Polish and in Bulgarian the findings of Lidz et al. (Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011) for the English quantifier most. We also obtain new evidence that participants are prompted to switch between verification procedures by a change in the linguistic input (a different superlative quantifier entailed by most), but not by a change in the visual input. Thus, the motivation for the subconscious switch in procedures is not to maximize efficiency. Participants use the procedure associated with each quantifier, and in effect, the same display is verified differently depending on which information the visual system is instructed to use by the semantic representation of the sentence