Psycholinguistic studies on the interpretation of quantified expressions : Interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics

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The study investigates how sentences involving surface anaphora are interpreted. Especially examined are 1) whether or not Japanese-speaking children are able to interpret stripping structures with case markers correctly, and 2) whether or not adults in fact depend on linguistic antecedents to interpret phonetically-null or alternative elements in the relevant anaphoric sentences, as the theory predicts, and what the waveforms would be like when they interpret such anaphoric sentences. For these purposes two types of experiments were conducted : one, offline with children and the other, online, using ERPs, with adults. It was found that 1) children are able to assign bound variable interpretations to both implicit variables and the anaphor zibun in the relevant structures and that 2) the relevant structures elicited a P600 effect. The second result in particular shows that the relevant anaphoric sentences are interpreted by copying the linguistic antecedents and that their interpretive process involves syntactic operations.