Are Quantifying Expressions Interpreted Incrementally?

Abstract

This paper investigates the temporal neural dynamics of the semanticprocessing of quantifier constructions in bilinguals. Sentencecomprehension has been debated with different views, and weconducted an event-related potential(ERP) study to examine thehypothesis that sentence comprehension is done in an incrementalmanner, as suggested with quantifier constructions in Urbach & Kutas(2010). The experiment was done with Korean L2 speakers of English ina between-group design depending on the proficiency level. Theexperimental results show that the meaning-related ERP component(N400), which was observed in L1 speakers, was not significantlyobserved in either proficiency group. Given the different processingpattern observed, the results suggest that the immediate, incrementalinterpretation view is hard to be maintained in L2 processing, at leastnot in the same manner as L1.