Monolingual and Bilingual Logical Representations of Quantificational Scope

A doubly quantified sentence, such as 'All hikers climbed a hill', allows two possible logical representations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line of research by investigating whether bilingual logical representations are shared between languages or separate per language. We conducted four sentence-picture matching experiments in which we primed possible interpretations of doubly quantified sentences in Dutch and French monolingual and bilingual language comprehension. These experiments showed that bilinguals have fully shared logical representations. Moreover, a control experiment ruled out that the priming effects were driven by visual overlap between prime and target pictures.