## Video presentation ## Check out our 5-min **video**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_rZR2VyzJ0 ---------- ## Q&A and connect with us! ## **Zoom**: We will be available for Q&A over Zoom during poster session C (Saturday 12-2pm)! Please use the following link to join our Zoom meeting: https://mit.zoom.us/j/877587277 **Commenting**: Also, please make use of the comments button in the upper right corner of your screen when viewing either the poster or the video. These questions will be visible to the public as will our responses. **Email**: You can also email me (Sherry) and Bob with any questions: sychen@mit.edu, bobvantiel@gmail.com ---------- ## Abstract ## Utterances like "Every horse didn’t jump over the fence'' are ambiguous between two readings, which are often explained by postulating different syntactic parses of the sentence, yielding a wide scope and a narrow scope reading of the universal quantifier. Recent work on scope ambiguity resolution further suggests that pragmatic cues, such as the Question Under Discussion (QUD), modulate the accessibility of the two readings. One issue that remains unaddressed is the division of labor between syntactic and pragmatic factors in shaping people's interpretation of "every-not'' utterances. We experimentally tested the predictions made by the Rational Speech Act framework, and provide an amendment of the formal model that yields a precise, explanatory, and predictive description of the observed human performance. We suggest that "every-not'' utterances have a default narrow scope parse of the universal quantifier, and that the ambiguity generally arises as a matter of pragmatically enrichment via listeners' probabilistic reasoning about the speaker's intention.