Are Bilingual Logical Representations Shared?: Priming scopally ambiguous sentences in English, Estonian, and Dutch

Do bilinguals use the same logical representations in processing both languages they know if the languages they know diverge on the preferred interpretation of a scopally ambiguous sentence? We investigated this question by studying effects of cross-linguistic influence and priming in the comprehension of scopally ambiguous all...not sentences. In this investigation, we focused on Estonian-English bilinguals, because these sentences are interpreted differently in English compared to Estonian.Across four sentence-picture matching experiments, we firstly observed that bilingual logical representations can be primed within languages (both from L1-to-L1 and from L2-to-L2) and between languages (both from L1-to-L2 and from L2-to-L1). This finding indicates that bilinguals make use of shared logical representations in processing the languages they know, and that logical representations do not specify language-specific biases in the assignment of scope. Secondly, we observed that bilinguals experience bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in the construction of logical representations. This finding suggests that bilingual representations of implicit knowledge about scopal preferences is integrated between the languages they know.