RESOLUTION OF QUANTIFIER SCOPE AMBIGUITIES

Various processing principles have been suggested to be governing the resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities in sentences such as Every kid climbed a tree. This paper investigates structural principles, tha t is, those which refer to the syntactic or semantic positions of the quantified phrases. To test these principles, the preferred interpreta tions for three grammatical constructions were determined in a task in which participants made speeded judgments of whether a sentence follo wing a doubly quantified sentence was a reasonable discourse continuat ion of the quantified sentence. The observed preferences cannot be exp lained by any single structural principle, but point instead to the in teraction of several principles. Contrary to many proposals, there is little or no effect of a principle that assigns scope according to the linear order of the phrases. The interaction of principles suggests t hat alternative interpretations of the ambiguity may be initially cons idered in parallel, followed by selection of the single interpretation that best satisfies the principles. These results are discussed in re lation to theories of ambiguity resolution at other levels of linguist ic representation.