The rise and fall of Isomorphism

This paper provides a critical review of recent work on children's interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences. Our question is whether current generalizations about scope resolution in child language adequately explain all the data that they should explain. In particular, we consider a generalization that has seen many incarnations, the so-called Observation of Isomorphism. We argue that the Observation of Isomorphism has no place in our theory of child language. In particular, we highlight the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of current theories which attribute a privileged role to surface scope in children's parsing (e.g., Musolino and Lidz, 2006). Furthermore, we show that the Observation of Isomorphism cannot even be invoked to describe children's non-adult behavior, by reviewing existing experimental findings showing that children may in fact select inverse scope interpretations for sentences that adults consistently interpret on surface scope (see Kramer, 2000; Hulsey et al., 2004).

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