Using Structural Priming to Study Scopal Representations and Operations

1 Introduction: Representations and Priming, the Case of Scopal Relations

1.1 Scopal Relations and Representations

Sentence (1) contains a universal quantifier every and an indefinite, existential quantifier a. Depending on which of these two elements takes scope over the other, we obtain two possible interpretations, as paraphrased unambiguously in (2).

1. (1). Every student read a book.

2. (2).

   1. a. Universal wide-scope interpretation
      For every student s, there is a book b(s) that s read.

   2. b. Universal narrow-scope interpretation
      There is a book b, such that every student read b.

The universal interpretation in (2a) is surface scope: the scopal relation between the universal quantifier every and the existential quantifier a matches the order and hierarchy in which they appear in (1). The interpretation in (2b) is reverse scope: the scopal relation is reversed between the sentence and the interpretive level.

Our point of departure is an interesting finding by Raffray and Pickering (2010), who demonstrated that people can be primed to derive particular scopal interpretations (see details below). In this squib, we emphasize that such priming results are useful either to characterize realistic layers of linguistic representation or to confirm the existence of linguistic operations of certain kinds. We do so by discussing two possible interpretations of Raffray and Pickering’s results and testing them in an experiment.

1.2 Layers of Representation and Priming

Raffray and Pickering’s (2010) study involved a structural priming paradigm (e.g., Bock 1986, Branigan, Pickering, and McLean 2005, Pickering and Branigan 1998, Thothathiri and Snedeker 2008; for a review, see Pickering and Ferreira 2008). Participants completed a sentence-picture verification task that involved matching one of two pictures to a scopally ambiguous sentence, such as (1). There were prime trials and probe trials. In prime trials, participants were forced to interpret the sentence with universal wide-scope (or universal narrow-scope) by the nature of the target picture, which contained a wide-scope image (or a narrow-scope image), and the foil picture, which contained an image that was inconsistent with the sentence. In probe trials, which immediately followed prime trials, one of the pictures corresponded to the universal wide-scope interpretation of the sentence and the other to the universal narrow-scope interpretation. Participants were therefore “free” to choose either interpretation in the probe trials. Across two experiments, Raffray and Pickering found that participants were more likely to select the picture matching the wide-scope interpretation following a wide-scope prime trial than following a narrow-scope prime trial. In other words, participants were primed to derive sentence interpretations with particular scopal relations. From these results, Raffray and Pickering concluded that participants formed disambiguated abstract representations that specify quantifier scope relations.

Concretely, the claim is that there exists a level of representation that looks like the following semiabstract patterns for the two possible interpretations of (1):

1. (3). Representations underlying the two interpretations

   1. a. Universal wide-scope representation
      Every … is such that there is a …

   2. b. Universal narrow-scope representation
      There is a … such that for every …

These representations abstract away from some information—for example, the content of the lexical material filling in the … parts. If these representations exist, we can understand why the activation of one of these patterns for a given sentence (the prime) can strengthen the activation of the same pattern for a subsequent sentence.

1.3 Linguistic Operations and Priming

Priming effects can reveal a level of representation at which prime and probe are made equivalent, as discussed above. But they can also argue for the existence of some operation that applies equally to both prime and probe. In our concrete case, there might be an operation that transforms an (a)-type interpretation into a (b)-type interpretation. This operation would correspond to a scope-reversing operation, call it O_SR. (An alternative plausible candidate for such an operation when indefinites are involved would be a domain-narrowing operation; we come back to this in the discussion section (section 3)). Such O_sr operations would traditionally fall under the label of “movement” operations in the...