Processing Negation Without Context - Why and When We Represent the Positive Argument

Research shows that when processing negative sentences without context, participants often represent states of affairs consistent with their positive counterparts. Why and when does this process occur? In a visual world eye-tracking study, 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 a scene containing a target (matches the implied shape of the final noun, e.g. an open window) and a competitor (mismatches the implied shape of the final noun, e.g. a closed window). Results show that in the simple condition, there is more interference from the competitor in the negatives compared to the positives shortly after the verb (shut). In the cleft condition, there is no difference between negatives and positives. Our results suggest that the representation of the positive is not a mandatory first step of negation processing (as per rejection accounts). Rather results support the incremental Question Under Discussion (QUD) accommodation account wherein inferences about sentence content and contextual source of relevance (QUD) are both the target of incremental sentence processing.