Psycholinguistic Evidence for Inverse Scope in Korean.

Abstract

We use experimental data to shed light on the ongoing question of whether Korean allows inverse scope interpretation in sentences containing an indefinite subject and a universally quantified direct object (e.g., 'Someone bought each loaf of bread at the bakery'). The results of an off-line acceptability judgment task (n=38) and an online self-paced reading task (n[Formula: see text]22) indicate that inverse scope interpretations are in fact permitted in Korean as a secondary option, as is also the case in English. We argue that the dispreference for the inverse scope reading reflects processing considerations related to burden on working memory.