Shallow Processing of Universal Quantification: A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Adults

Abstract

Recent studies in sentence processing suggest that listeners often engage in shallow syntactic processing, and construct interpretations that do not capture the true content of a sentence (e.g., Ferreira et al, 2002; Sanford & Sturt, 2002). Clahsen & Felser (2006) have suggested that L2 learners are especially prone to shallow processing and often rely on lexical-semantic as opposed to syntactic information across a range of different constructions. Our study examines shallow processing in interpreting universal quantifiers. Brooks & Braine (1996) observed numerous errors in children in contexts where sets of objects are in partial one-to-one correspondence (see Figure 1). Brooks & Sekerina (in press) were surprised to find that even college students made similar errors as children in a picture-choice task, with many performing at chance. Here we use a sentence-picture verification task to examine whether undergraduates still exhibit chance performance in processing universal quantifiers. We compare monolingual (N=98) and bilingual speakers of English as an L2 (N=82) to explore Clahsen & Felser’s hypothesis with fluent bilinguals. Every alligator is in a bathtub-‘No’ Every bathtub has an alligator in it- ‘Yes’