We present two eye-tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like “The tall girl is the only one that …,” which are ambiguous between the anaphoric and the exophoric interpretation. These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric reading entails the anaphoric, while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants (...) interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth-conditional considerations about informativity and strength. (shrink)

This paper investigates the influence of contrastive stress in resolving potential semantic ambiguities. The sentences under investigation contain the focus operator only. Sentences with only have three main properties: (a) some sentential element is typically in focus, (b) the speaker presupposes that a set of alternatives to the focus element (the contrast set) has previously been introduced in the context; and (c) the speaker makes the assertion that the focus element has some unique property which other members of the reference (...) set lack. Previous literature on focus has concluded that stress plays a role in the interpretation of only-sentences in many natural languages, including English (Rooth, 1992). In processing terms, this suggests that contrastive stress could immediately determine which NP bears the semantic focus (and therefore the NP that presupposes a contrast set in the context). On this scenario, the processing cost associated with contrastive stress should be no greater than the cost associated with neutral stress. There is, however, a theoretically motivated proposal that makes the opposite prediction (Reinhart, 1999). As we understand it, in this model the parser is expected calculate default stress first, with its associated interpretation, and only later reanalyze the sentence, if necessary, based on the contrastive stress pattern. Since in English the default stress falls on the last NP of the sentence, any deviation from this pattern will be more costly. In processing sentences with contrastive stress, the model implies that the parser first calculates the interpretation that is associated with the default stress pattern. In this regard, young children’s interpretation of sentences with stress and the focus operator only is of special interest. Because young children are in the throes of grammar formation, their behavior can reveal default strategies for sentence processing, as well as the extent to which the parser’s sensitivity to contrastive stress is universal, i.e., includes child languages.. (shrink)

Much current research is devoted to children’s non-adult responses to sentences containing the universal quantifier every. In this chapter we review two alternative views: one that attributes children’s responses to nonadult grammars and one that focuses on extra-linguistic factors to explain children’s non-adult responses. We argue that the grammatical view faces several theoretical concerns, and, in light of research experimental findings, we demonstrate that it also suffers from limited explanatory power.

Portioning-out and individuation are two important semantic properties for the characterization of countability. In Mandarin, nouns are not marked with count-mass syntax, and it is controversial whether individuation is encoded in classifiers or in nouns. In the present study, we investigates the interpretation of a minimal pair of non-interrogative wh-pronominal phrases, including duo-shao-N and duo-shao-ge-N. Due to the presence/absence of the individual classifier ge, these two wh-pronominal phrases differ in how they encode portioning-out and individuation. In two experiments, we used (...) a Truth Value Judgment Task to examine the interpretation of these two wh-pronominal phrases by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4-to-6-year-old children. We found that both adults and children are sensitive to their interpretative differences with respect to the portioning-out and individuation properties. They assign either count or mass readings to the bare wh-pronominal phrase duo-shao-N depending on specific contexts, but only count readings to the classifier-bearing wh-pronominal phrase duo-shao-ge-N. Moreover, the portioning-out and individuation properties associated with the individual classifier ge emerge independently in the course of language development, with the portioning-out property taking precedence over the individuation property. Taken together, the present study provides new evidence for the view that the portioning-out and individuation properties in Mandarin are encoded in classifiers rather than in nouns, and these two semantic properties are two distinct components in our grammar. (shrink)

Many experimental investigations of human sentence processing have shown that listeners do not wait until they reach the end of a sentence before they begin to compute an interpretation. Rather, listeners incrementally make commitments to an interpretation as the linguistic input unfolds in real time. A consequence of this property of sentence comprehension is that it sometimes gives rise to so-called garden-path effects. In the presence of a temporary ambiguity, listeners may assign an interpretation that later turns out to be (...) unviable and must, therefore, be abandoned in favor of an alternative interpretation. Various explanations have been proposed to account for garden- path effects that have been documented in certain experimental contexts (Frazier and Rayner, 1982; Trueswell and Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald, 1994, among others). One line of research has claimed, however, that the referential contexts in which sentences ordinarily appear often mitigate, or even completely eliminate, garden-path effects. This is the Referential Theory proposed by Crain and Steedman (1985) and extended by Altmann and Steedman (1988). According to the Referential Theory, people experience garden-path effects primarily when sentences are interpreted outside any referential context or in infelicitous contexts. If the Referential Theory is correct, garden-path effects are largely experimental artifacts. Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip, (1999) suggests that children might not be sensitive to features of the referential context to the same.. (shrink)

Studies of adult sentence processing have established that the referential context in which sentences are presented plays an immediate role in their interpretation, such that referential features of the context mitigate, and even eliminate, so-called ‘garden-path’ effects. Perceivers experience garden path effects almost exclusively when they are attempting to parse locally ambiguous linguistic structures in the absence of context, or in infelicitous contexts. The finding that the referential context ordinarily obviates garden path effects is compelling evidence for the Referential Theory (...) of parsing, advanced originally by Crain and Steedman, (1985) and extended in Altmann and Steedman (1988). (shrink)