The role of processing capacity in scope assignment by Mandarin-acquiring children

Children’s command of scope knowledge is influenced by many factors, including syntax, pragmatics, and processing capacity (Lidz 2016). This paper uses a covered-box task to investigate Mandarin-acquiring children’s interpretation of sentences with a universal quantifier and an indefinite phrase, and a digit-span test to uncover the relation between processing capacity and scope assignments. The results show that Mandarin-speaking children allowed more inverse scope readings than adults, and that a child’s acceptance rate of inverse scope readings inversely correlated with his/her scores in backward recalling task. These findings support the proposal of the reference set computation by Reinhart (1999, 2006).