Similarities in the processing of scrambling and quantifier scope ambiguities – a shared source?

In psycholinguistics, phenomena which are commonly analysed as involving some type of movement are associated with increased costs in sentence processing (Anderson, 2004; Bornkessel et al., 2002; Friederici et al., 2006; Gibson, 2000). But these increased costs are not the same for all speakers. In particular, while some speakers can rely on interpretations that require movement with no additional efforts, other speakers either seem to reject them or have more difficulties with these interpretations (Brasoveanu & Dotlačil, 2015; Caplan et al., 2011; Caplan & Waters, 1999; Gil, 1982; Kemper & Liu, 2007; King & Just, 1991; Philipp & Zimmermann, 2020; Pregla, et al., 2021; Vogelzang et al., 2019; Wingfield et al., 2003). However, what factors drive these individual differences is currently unclear. Knowing their sources will help us to sharpen our knowledge about the linguistic system. We therefore aim to investigate inter-individual differences in processing of movement at the interface of semantics and syntax. Specifically, we take two phenomena in German which exhibit the variable processing pattern mentioned above: non-canonical object-before-subject word orders (scrambling) and inverse scope readings in quantifier scope ambiguities. We present a self-paced-reading experiment, which gives additional insight into the processing of these two phenomena. While previous findings regarding processing difficulties can be replicated for both scrambling and quantifier scope, no evidence for an underlying connection can be found on basis of individual participant data.