UC San Diego

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied factor that may contribute to this variability, namely print exposure, and argue that print exposure is related to spoken language at multiple levels of the grammar. In Chapter 1, I present evidence that individuals with higher levels of print exposure provide more polarized ratings on a standard syntactic acceptability judgment task and argue that this is due to greater evidence for licit syntactic structures because of additional input due to exposure to print. In Chapter 2, I provide further evidence for this argument by examining the relationship between print exposure and participants’ resolution preferences when confronted with sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity. I find that individuals with higher print exposure give lower ratings to sentences exhibiting quantifier scope ambiguity and have significantly longer reaction times for inverse items in particular, than lower print exposure participants. From this, I conclude that high print exposure may strengthen expectations for the dominant surface scope interpretation, again because of greater evidence for the more common or preferred structure. Finally, in Chapter 3, I explore the phenomenon of variability in scalar implicature, specifically with respect to the accessibility of stronger alternatives. I suggest two novel methods: one for generating scales for use in tasks on scalar implicature, and one for testing whether an implicature has occurred. I find some evidence that accessibility is an important factor in the computation of scalar implicature, but also note various improvements that should be considered with respect to the task design for the two new methods introduced in this study.