Scope assignment in quantifier-negation sentences in early Korean-Chinese bilinguals’ grammars

Abstract

Quantifier-negation sentences allow an inverse scope reading in many languages, but this phenomenon is not observed in Chinese. Building on the work of Chen and Huan (2023), this study investigates whether early Korean-Chinese bilinguals can make a distinction between Korean and Chinese in terms of the inverse scope. Employing the sentence-picture matching truth value judgment experiment from Chen and Huan (2023), we recruited a group of 23 early Korean-Chinese bilinguals and 15 monolingual Korean speakers. The experimental results aligned with those of Chen and Huan (2023), which identified three distinct groups of bilinguals. The first group permits an inverse scope reading in both Korean and Chinese, the second group prohibits it in both languages, and the third group successfully distinguishes between Korean and Chinese regarding inverse scope. These findings suggest that early bilinguals may experience long-lasting crosslinguistic influence that extends into adulthood. They may adopt either of two opposite strategies when constructing sentences, both of which can potentially minimize syntactic differences between their two languages.