Proceedings of the 19 th Amsterdam Colloquium

We frame the general problem of ‘rationally’ (in the sense of Anderson et al’s ACT-Rframework) integrating semantic theories and processing, and indicate how this integratedtheory could be explicitly formalized; an explicit formalization enables us to empiricallyevaluate semantic and processing theories both qualitatively and quantitatively. We thenintroduce the problem of quantifier scope, the processing difficulty of inverse scope, andtwo types of theories of scope, and discuss the results of a self-paced reading experimentand its consequences for these two types of theories. Finally, we outline how probabilitiesfor LF construction rules could be computed based on the experimental results.