How Do People Quantify Naturally: Evidence from Mandarin Picture Description
This work addresses the problem of understanding natural quantification in language production for linguists and cognitive scientists, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The study investigated how Mandarin speakers decide to quantify objects in naturalistic picture descriptions, finding that object numerosity, animacy, and production modality systematically influence quantification likelihood, precision, and strategy choice.
Quantification is a fundamental component of everyday language use, yet little is known about how speakers decide whether and how to quantify in naturalistic production. We investigate quantification in Mandarin Chinese using a picture-based elicited description task in which speakers freely described scenes containing multiple objects, without explicit instructions to count or quantify. Across both spoken and written modalities, we examine three aspects of quantification: whether speakers choose to quantify at all, how precise their quantification is, and which quantificational strategies they adopt. Results show that object numerosity, animacy, and production modality systematically shape quantificational behaviour. In particular, increasing numerosity reduces both the likelihood and the precision of quantification, while animate referents and modality selectively modulate strategy choice. This study demonstrates how quantification can be examined under unconstrained production conditions and provides a naturalistic dataset for further analyses of quantity expression in language production.