Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, United Kingdom.
Psychol Sci. 2010 Aug;21(8):1090-7. doi: 10.1177/0956797610375446. Epub 2010 Jun 29.
How do people interpret ambiguous sentences containing more than one quantifier, such as Every kid climbed a tree? We report four sentence-picture matching experiments that used priming to investigate whether comprehenders construct logical-form representations during processing. Experiment 1 investigated priming in active-voice sentences containing transitive verbs and found priming effects of quantifier-scope relations. Experiment 2 demonstrated priming effects when prime sentences were in the passive voice (e.g., A tree was climbed by every kid) and target sentences were in the active voice. Experiment 3 used prime sentences containing existentially quantified agents and universally quantified patients (e.g., A kid climbed every tree) and found no priming effects. Experiment 4 showed no priming effects when prime sentences contained plural nouns but no quantifiers (e.g., Kids like to climb trees), thus calling into question a visual-priming account of our priming effects. Our findings suggest that people construct logical-form representations, and they do so after constructing meaning-based representations involving quantifiers and thematic-role information.
人们如何解释包含多个量词的歧义句，例如“每个孩子都爬了一棵树”？我们报告了四项句子-图片匹配实验，这些实验使用启动来研究理解者在处理过程中是否构建逻辑形式表示。实验 1 研究了包含及物动词的主动语态句子中的启动作用，并发现了量词范围关系的启动效应。实验 2 证明了当启动句子是被动语态（例如，一棵树被每个孩子爬）而目标句子是主动语态时存在启动效应。实验 3 使用包含存在量词的主语和全称量词的宾语的启动句子（例如，每个孩子都爬了每一棵树），但没有发现启动效应。实验 4 表明，当启动句子包含复数名词但没有量词时（例如，孩子们喜欢爬树），没有启动效应，从而对我们的启动效应的视觉启动解释提出了质疑。我们的发现表明，人们构建逻辑形式表示，并且在构建涉及量词和主题角色信息的基于意义的表示之后构建这些表示。
