Abstract: The sentence "every road leads to a town" is ambiguous. It can be interpreted in at least two different ways: either the roads all lead to one town (singular), or they lead to different towns (plural). The ambiguity in this example arises due to the quantifier "every" and is often referred to as quantifier scope ambiguity (Kurtzman and MacDonald, 1993; Sayeed, et al., 2019). There are other types of ambiguity, such as lexical ambiguity. The sentence "there is a problem with the bat" could for example mean a problem with a flying nocturnal mammal that sleeps upside down, or with a piece of equipment used in sports, like baseball. The ambiguity arises from the ambiguous word "bat." Although ambiguity is a frequent phenomenon in language use, we still do not have a clear understanding of the processes that allow language users to interpret ambiguous sentences. We know that contextual factors will aid the processing of ambiguous sentences, but there is no consensus concerning how a particular interpretation is made. By examining how our brains handle ambiguity, we can increase our understanding of human language use. The parts of the brain that primarily process language form the perisylvian language network (Catani et al., 2005). At the same time, several areas in the brain are activated during language use. General comprehension of quantifiers has been shown to activate the right inferior parietal lobe (McMillan, et al., 2005), an area linked to numerosity and counting. It is not yet clear how quantifier scope ambiguity is processed neurally. We do not know which areas of the brain are activated when language users interpret quantifier scope ambiguity. Previous studies have shown that lexical ambiguity activates areas outside the perisylvian language network (Powell, et al., 2019). In this project, both quantifier scope ambiguity and lexical ambiguity will be examined. To do so, we are using both behavioural experiments and brain imaging. In the brain imaging experiments, the participants are listening to speakers talking and making ambiguous statements, while an MRI scanner captures functional images of the participants' brains. We will investigate which brain areas are activated during the processing of ambiguous sentences. We will compare lexical ambiguity and quantifier scope ambiguity to see if, and how, the processing of these different types of ambiguity differs from one another. We will also examine how contextual information affects the processing of the different types of ambiguity.
Location: Attend in person at room J411 or via Zoom, https://gu-se.zoom.us/j/66299274809?pwd=Yjc2ejc2VVhraXVJMmhWeWtOQ2NuUT09
Time: 13:15-15:00