Quantifier Scope in English

This paper investigated English speakers’comprehension of scopally ambiguous sentences containing universally quantified subject NP and negation in English by way of two experiments—the off-line sentence judgment task and the on-line self-paced reading task. Although no dominant preference for either scope interpretation emerged in the case of the off-line sentence judgment task, clear results were borne out in a real time process. In the on-line experiment, the native English speakers showed a preference for the surface scope interpretation over the inverse scope reading in English. With the latter interpretation, they accepted the target sentence less frequently and took longer to associate the ambiguous sentence with this reading. A slowdown at the object NP—the region corresponding to the first region after the negative—was detected in the inverse scope interpretation. Taken together, the results in real time suggest that the surface scope interpretation was more easily computed than the inverse scope interpretation. The core findings in the experiments were discussed on the basis of the processing-based account by O’Grady (2005).