An attempted replication of Hackl, Koster-Hale, Varvoutis (2012)

TL;DR

This study attempted to replicate previous findings on the processing differences in ACD structures with quantified versus definite NPs, but failed to reproduce the original effects, questioning their validity.

Contribution

It provides a critical replication attempt that challenges prior claims about ACD processing advantages linked to quantifier raising.

Findings

Failed to replicate key effects from HKV's experiments

Original effects were likely due to post-hoc analysis decisions

Questions the evidence for quantifier raising in ACD processing

Abstract

Hackl, Koster-Hale & Varvoutis (2012; Journal of Semantics, 29, 145-206; HKV) provide data that suggested that in a null context, antecedent-contained-deletion (ACD) relative clause structures modifying a quantified object noun phrase are easier to process than those modifying a definite object NP. HKV argue that this pattern of results supports a quantifier-raising (QR) analysis of both ACD structures and quantified NPs in object position: under the account that they advocate, both ACD resolution and quantified NPs in object position require movement of the object NP to a higher syntactic position. The processing advantage for quantified object NPs in ACD is hypothesized to derive from the fact that - at the point where ACD resolution must take place - the quantified NP has already undergone QR whereas this is not the case for definite NPs. Here, we report attempted replications of their self-paced reading Experiments 1 and 2. We do not replicate the critical interactions in any of the words immediately following the disambiguating verb in either experiment. Putting these observations together with the observation that it was only post-hoc analysis decisions that were responsible for HKV's observed effects in the first place (Gibson et al., submitted), we conclude that the experiments reported by HKV should not be viewed as providing evidence for the ACD quantifier raising processing effect.