The mental representation of universal quantifiers: evidence from verification

The meaning of sentences like every circle is blue could be represented in speakers’ minds in terms of individuals and their properties (e.g., for each thing that’s a circle, it’s blue) or in terms of relations between groups (e.g., the blue things include the circles). In other words, both the tools of first-order logic, as in (1-2), and the tools of second-order logic, as in (3-4), can be used to represent the meaning of universally quantified statements.