Processing Scope Relations Between Universal Quantifers In Subjerct Position And Negation In Chinese By L1Speakers And L2Learners

In English, the universal quantifier every in the subject position can interact withnegation, yielding both surface and inverse scope interpretations. In contrast, Chinesesentences containing the universal quantifier―mei‖and negation―meiyou‖rigidlycomply with the Isomorphism Principe. Thus regarding scope relations, English is theSuperset language, and Chinese the Subset language. This imposes a challenge tosecond language learners whose native language is English, because they need tounlearn the inverse scope interpretation that is disallowed in Chinese.Very little existing work has investigated this issue using online experimentalmethod. The present research aimed to fill this gap by testing native speakers ofChinese (Experiment1) and L2-Chinese learners (Experiment2), both usingself-paced reading combined with a truth value judgment task.Results showed that similar to Chinese native speakers, adult high-orintermediate-level L2learners correctly rejected the inverse scope as False‘thancorrectly accepted the surface scope as True‘with a numerically higher rate, but theywere significantly faster in correctly accepting the surface scope as True‘than incorrectly rejecting the inverse scope as False‘. Such results are expected, suggestingthat L2-Chinese learners can unlearn the inverse scope reading that is permitted bytheir L1English, and successfully acquire the surface scope reading.One surprising finding, however, is that for most word regions of the testsentences, both groups read more quickly in contexts supporting inverse scope than incontexts supporting surface scope. This may be due to similarity-induced interferencein retrieving events as constrained by working memory during on-line processing. Thepresence of dou‘in the stimuli might also have cued participants to reset theparameter value. Taken as a whole, the results are consistent with the predictions made by theSubset Principle hypothesis in L2acquisition, thus supporting the hypothesis thatUniversal Grammar is accessible to adult second language learners.