Figure 1.

Experimental design. (A) Overall design: Auditory sentence stimuli were of the form “Quantifier of the circles are color,” where Quantifier was one of six proportional quantifiers, and color was blue or yellow. Each of the 12 resulting sentences was followed by a visual array of a fixed numerosity T = 50 blue and yellow circles, in which blue/yellow ratio was varied parametrically: the comparandum numerosity c of circles in the TarCol was a parameter, taking the values 5, 10, …, 45. As T was fixed, the numerosity of circles in the other color r varied accordingly (45, 40, …, 5 out of 50). Three different tokens were generated for each proportion, and combined with the sentences. (B) Time course of a trial: The auditory part was 2.8 s long (sentence duration was ≤2.8 s). Subsequently, an image was presented (1.2 s). Participants were asked to make a truth-value judgment by a button press. RTs were time-locked to the visual phase of the trial, where overall trial duration was 6 s. Speeded responses were mostly <2 s, which enabled a short rest period before the next trial began.