Latinx Research Week (LRW) is a conference that celebrates the scholarship of Latinx students, researchers, and faculty at U-M, and uplifts research relevant to Latinx communities. LRW provides a unique, interdisciplinary space where scholars across campus can share their research and build new connections. From March 13 to March 16, 2023, researchers will showcase their work through oral presentation sessions, a poster session, as well as attend other sponsored events.
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Title: Una persona tiene cada idea: Scope ambiguity intuitions by Spanish/English bilinguals

This research examines the understudied question of how Spanish/English bilinguals interpret ambiguous sentences. In some languages like English and Spanish, sentences with two expressions specifying quantity, or quantifiers (for instance, ‘every’, ‘some’, and ‘a’), are syntactically ambiguous, meaning their structure permits two possible interpretations (see example 1). Although the construction is ambiguous, research suggests that speakers of these languages tend to prefer one interpretation that is more instinctive. Furthermore, some studies suggest that bilinguals may have a different intuitions of the sentence interpretation for each of their languages (Lee, 2009; Scontras et al., 2017). Importantly, language dominance, language proficiency and order of acquisition have been suggested as possible predictors of whether bilinguals do have a divergence between their two languages.

(1) A person bought every book

Interpretation 1: Say there are 10 books and all were bought by a single person

Interpretation 2: Say there are 10 books and each was bought by a different person

To date, research has not investigated how Spanish/English bilinguals interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences of quantifier scope. The current study therefore advances this research and also asks whether Spanish/English bilinguals show divergence in the two languages. Furthermore, this work attempts to determine whether a given factor (language proficiency, order of acquisition, etc) better predicts divergence in the two languages, if divergence arises. To answer these questions, an experimental study is being conducted with 60 Mexican-Spanish/English heritage bilinguals. Participants complete three tasks: Judging whether a sentence is true or false to determine how instinctive the two possible interpretations are, (2) a proficiency test in both languages, and (3) a language background questionnaire to collect linguistic information of the participants. Pending complete data collection, t-test and correlation analyses will be used to examine the results.