No abstract

In sentence comprehension, negative sentences tend to elicit more processing cost than affirmative sentences. A growing body of work has shown that pragmatic context is an important factor that contributes to negation comprehension cost. The nature of this pragmatic effect, however, is yet to be determined. In 4 behavioral experiments, the current study assesses 2 possible pragmatic accounts: the expectation-based and the informativity-based accounts. Our findings suggest that informativity, instead of contextual expectation, is more directly responsible for negation comprehension. Contextual expectation only modulates negation comprehension cost if it facilitates the appropriate type of question under discussion.

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting that pragmatics can modulate this difficulty. We test the pragmatic hypothesis that listeners’ processing of negation is influenced by expectations about speakers’ production of negation by directly comparing speakers and listeners in two pairs of experiments. In both experiments, speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. And in both experiments, listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. We argue that general pragmatic principles that apply to all sentences can help explain the challenges of processing negation.

No abstract

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting that pragmatics can modulate this difficulty. We test the pragmatic hypothesis that listeners’ processing of negation is influenced by expectations about speakers’ production of negation by directly comparing speakers and listeners in two pairs of experiments. In both experiments, speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. And in both experiments, listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. We argue that general pragmatic principles that apply to all sentences can help explain the challenges of processing negation.