How Do People Quantify Naturally: Evidence from Mandarin Picture Description

TL;DR

This study explores how Mandarin speakers naturally decide to quantify objects in scenes, revealing influences of object number, animacy, and modality on their quantificational choices in spontaneous speech and writing.

Contribution

It provides the first naturalistic dataset analyzing quantification strategies in Mandarin, highlighting factors affecting quantification in unconstrained language production.

Findings

Higher object numerosity decreases quantification likelihood and precision.

Animacy influences the choice of quantificational strategies.

Production modality affects strategy selection.

Abstract

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.