Tian, Y; Ferguson, H; Breheny, R; (2016) Processing negation without context - why and when we represent the positive argument. Language Cognition And Neuroscience , 31 (5) pp. 683-698. 10.1080/23273798.2016.1140214.

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Abstract

When processing negative sentences without context, participants often represent states of the positive arguments. Why and when does this occur? Using visual world eye-tracking, participants listened to positive and negative sentences in simple or cleft forms (e.g., [It is] Matt [who] hasn’t shut his dad’s window), while looking at scenes containing a target and a competitor (matches or mismatches the implied shape of the final noun). Results show that in the simple but not the cleft condition, there is a difference between negatives and positives: shortly after the verb, there is more looks to the competitor in the simple negatives than the positives. This suggests that the representation of the positive is not a mandatory first step of negation processing (as per rejection accounts). Rather results support the Question Under Discussion (QUD) accommodation account wherein both sentence content and contextual source of relevance are targets of incremental sentence processing.

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