Quantification and the Garden Path Effect Reduction: The Case of Universally Quantified Subjects

This paper investigates the effect of quantification in sentence processing. The experimental results show that temporarily ambiguous sentences that begin with the universally quantified NPs reduced the garden path effect in contrast to the ones that begin with bare NPs. This fact is accounted for by assuming that discourse representation structures are incrementally constructed, and a tripartite structure introduced by the universal quantifier gives a room for temporal ambiguity while a single box associated with a bare NP forces one interpretation and to get the correct interpretation, the single box must be rewritten, which results in the garden path effect.