The Resolution of Wh-Scope Ambiguity in Korean and Locality Bias

Abstract

The interpretation of a wh-phrase in Korean is structurally dependent on the position of a question particle in the sentence. In order to investigate how native speakers of Korean resolve the dependency between a wh-phrase and a question particle, this study administered a sentence fragment completion test to 76 adult native speakers of Korean. The participants were presented with sentence fragments containing a wh-phrase in three conditions, which varied by the position of the wh-phrase, and then were asked to provide their own words to complete the sentences. The analysis of the responses revealed that the participants strongly preferred to fix the scope for a wh-phrase as early as possible, after the argument position of a wh-phrase. The findings confirm previous findings on a locality bias in the processing of in-situ wh-constructions, and further provide evidence for the bias in the processing of scrambled-wh constructions.