Laurent Dekydtspotter, Department of French and Italian, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall 642, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405. Internet: [email protected]

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Abstract

This article presents a reading-time study of scope resolution in the interpretation of ambiguous cardinality interrogatives in English-French and in English and French native sentence processing. Participants were presented with a context, a self-paced segment-by-segment presentation of a cardinality interrogative, and a numerical answer that respondents either accepted or rejected. Very narrowly distributed and interpretation-dependent reading-time asymmetries arose in English-French processing and in French and English native processing. A syntactic account of scope resolution characterizes the reading-time asymmetries produced by English-French learners and differences between French and English native respondents. In contrast, a context-driven theory of scope resolution encounters many severe problems that render its plausibility exceedingly remote.

Footnotes

This work was funded in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. SBR-9729073, “On-Line Processing of Syntactic and Semantic Representations in Interlanguage,” to Laurent Dekydtspotter and Rex A. Sprouse and by an undergraduate research grant from Indiana University to Samantha Outcalt and Laurent Dekydtspotter. We thank Rex A. Sprouse and Jon Hathorn for their help during the development of testing materials. We also thank three anonymous Language Learning reviewers for detailed criticisms that helped us considerably improve our presentation and argumentation and pointed out potential problem areas. Our argumentation also benefited from comments from Rex Sprouse, Bonnie Schwartz, and the members of the Second Language Research Group at Indiana University. We also wish to thank Lydia White and Harald Clahsen and audience members at the 28th Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 2003. We are also grateful for the input we received at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (University of Utrecht), September 2003. We acknowledge the statistical help of Takuya Noguchi of the Center for Statistical and Mathematical Computing at Indiana University. We are most grateful to the respondents and course administrators for their generosity.

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Volume55, Issue1

March 2005

Pages 1-36

A Syntactic Bias in Scope Ambiguity Resolution in the Processing of English-French Cardinality Interrogatives: Evidence for Informational Encapsulation

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A Syntactic Bias in Scope Ambiguity Resolution in the Processing of English-French Cardinality Interrogatives: Evidence for Informational Encapsulation

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