2018 Friday Poster 6474

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

L1-Chinese L2-English Speakers’ Acquisition of English Quantifier-Negation Scope
M. Wu, T. Ionin

English sentences with a universal quantifier subject and negation are scopally ambiguous (see (1)-(2) in Table 2). Native English speakers allow both surface-scope (all/every>not) and inverse-scope (not>all/every) readings, though the former are preferred (Musolino et al., 2000). In contrast, Chinese is a scope-rigid language, which allows only the surface-scope readings (Aoun & Li, 1994). Thus, L1-transfer should lead L1-Chinese L2-English learners to allow only the surface-scope, all/every>not readings of (1)-(2). While there have been several prior L1-transfer studies on double-quantifier scope (Marsden, 2009; Scontras et al., 2017), quantifier-negation scope has received very little attention in L2-literature (but see Chung, 2012 on the scope of negative sentences with a universal object with L1-Korean L2-English adult learners). This study aims to determine whether quantifier-negation scope interactions are subject to transfer from Chinese to English, and whether learners can recover from transfer in this domain.

A context-based Acceptability Judgment Task was used, in which participants rated each sentence on a scale from 1 (unacceptable) to 4 (acceptable) in the context of a short story accompanied by a picture (see Table 1). In addition to the target sentence types in (1)-(2), control sentence types in (3)-(4) were included, which were either unambiguously true or unambiguously false in each context, as shown in Table 2. The four sentence types were distributed across four lists using a Latin-square design; within each list, each sentence type occurred with both contexts, 5 tokens per context/sentence mapping. Each list contained 40 target items and 60 fillers. All participants did the English version of the task, and learners did the Chinese version at least two weeks later.

“No Action” Context makes the English target sentences true on both surface-scope and inverse-scope readings, while “Partial Action” Context makes them true only on inverse-scope and false on surface-scope. Thus, L1-transfer should lead L1-Chinese L2-English learners to accept (1)-(2) only in “No Action” Context.

Results from 28 native English speakers and 36 intermediate-to-advanced L1-Chinese L2-English learners (tested in the U.S.) were consistent with L1-transfer (see Graphs 1, 2 and 3). The results showed that the learners were quite target-like in the control conditions, but consistently rejected sentences (1)-(2) on the inverse-scope reading and accepted them only on the surface-scope reading, as they did in the Chinese version. In contrast, native English speakers allowed both surface-scope and inverse-scope readings, though the surface-scope readings were preferred, as testified in previous studies. Across-group comparison results (see Table 3) showed that native English speakers’ acceptance of the sentences (1)-(2) with “Partial Action” context was significantly higher than learners’.

Our findings show that even fairly advanced learners, living in an English environment, do not recognize that English quantifier/negation sentences are scopally ambiguous, which may suggest that positive evidence is infrequent and/or particularly subtle. Availability of inverse-scope for (1)-(2) has been linked to a particular prosodic contour (Büring, 1997), so future work should investigate learners’ sensitivity to prosodic cues in this domain.

References

Aoun, Joseph, & Li, Y.-H. Audrey. (1989). Constituency and scope. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 141-172. Aoun, Joseph, & Li, Y.-H. Audrey. (1994). Syntax of Scope. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Büring, Daniel. (1997a). The great scope inversion conspiracy. Linguistics and Philosophy, 20, 175-194.

Christensen, Rune Haubo Bojesen. (2015). Ordinal – Regression Models for Ordinal Data. R package version 2015. 6-28. Chung, Eun Seon. (2012). Sources of Difficulty in L2 Scope Judgments. Second Language Research, 29(3), 285-310.

Lenth, Russell V. (2016). Least-Squares Means: The R Package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1), 1-33. doi:10.18637/jss.v069.i01.

Marsden, Heather. (2009). Distributive Quantifier Scope in English-Japanese and Korean-Japanese Interlanguage. Language Acquisition, 16(3), 135-177.

Musolino, Julien, Crain, Stephen, & Thornton, Rosalind. (2000). Navigating negative quantificational space. Linguistics, 38(1), 1-32.

Scontras, Gregory, Polinsky, Maria, Tsai, C.-Y. Edwin, & Mai, Kenneth. (2017). Cross-linguistic scope ambiguity: When two systems meet. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2(1), 1-28.