Doctoral Dissertation Research: Active assignment of quantifier scope guides language processing

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Language processing often appears to be effortless as humans rapidly decode linguistic signals to form meaningful representations of what they have just heard or read. While much of what has been observed in human language processing is well predicted by linguistic theory, some grammatically illicit sentences are perceived as acceptable. These linguistic illusions, where observed behavior does not align neatly with predictions of well-established grammatical theories, provide opportunities to observe differences between the structure of language and how language is processed.

This doctoral dissertation project addresses one of these illusions, the negative polarity item illusion, and develops a new framework in which the illusion follows as a consequence of independent principles for processing quantification and scope. Developing frameworks for the processes that drive these linguistic illusions is critical for both our grammatical theories and theories of language related behavior.

Beyond the benefits to linguistic and language processing research, these models also provide critical theoretical scaffolding for work in domains such as human computer interaction and neurolinguistics.

This project uses eye-tracking while reading along with other online and offline measures to observe the processing of various kinds of sentences. These include sentences which are related to the negative polarity item illusion and are designed to isolate how different factors such as polarity valence and the syntactic environment contribute to the observed illusion effect.

Additional sentences investigated are designed to examine how scope is computed in online processing, a critical but understudied factor in the negative polarity item illusion. Based on existing research and the newly acquired data, the primary goal of the project is the development of a new model for the processing of scope and quantification called reckless scope processing, which recasts a problematic illusion as an expected consequence of a necessary language processing procedure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.