Can NEG placement have negative consequences (for efficient processing)? A bilingual test case

Abstract

The present study examines the relative processing efficiency of two typologically diverse configurations of sentential negation: immediately preverbal NEG and unbounded clause-final NEG. In order to effect a head-to-head comparison, the data are drawn from a bilingual speech community in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, in which two lexically cognate languages are in contact, differing principally in the placement of the sentential negator: Spanish (preverbal NEG) and the Afro-Hispanic creole language Palenquero (clause-final NEG). The results of a series of experiments suggest that preverbal negation is quite robust, while processing of clause-final negation is degraded under increased cognitive demands. Contextual and pragmatic cues ameliorate the processing of likely negative utterances, while unbounded clause-final negation is more vulnerable in ambiguous utterances. The contrasting behavior of Spanish and Palenquero negation highlights the possible role of processing mechanisms as contributing to typological differences among languages.

Structural and Extralinguistic Aspects of Code-Switching: Evidence From Papiamentu-Dutch Auditory Sentence Matching

“…There are various explanations for this difference in response latency to ungrammatical stimuli (e.g., failure to create higher order representations for ungrammatical sentences in Freedman and Forster, 1985; slow down due to the correction of ungrammatical higher order representations in Crain and Fodor, 1987). Whatever the explanation, the empirical findings seem to support the idea that the task reveals something about underlying grammatical representations in both native and non-native language users (e.g., Duffield et al, 2002Duffield et al, , 2007; for a critique of STMs in second language studies, see Gass, 2001), and in bilinguals (e.g., Dussias, 1997Dussias, , 2001Lipski, 2018).…”

“…Roberts, 2012 ). Auditory SMTs have been used to study sentence processing in early second language users (Verhagen, 2009 ) as well as in bilingual sentence processing (Lipski, 2018 ).…”

Reinforcement of Grammatical Structures through Explicit Instruction in Palenquero Creole: A Pilot Study

“…Examples of proficiency measurements that have been used are self-report questionnaires, sociolinguistic interviews, and judgements from teachers and community leaders. With regard to characteristics that can set Palenquero heritage/L2 speakers apart from fluent adult speakers, researchers have analyzed "the usage of preverbal particles (Lipski 2020b;Smith 2013Smith , 2014, Spanish-like feminine gender agreement (Lipski 2015(Lipski , 2018b, placement and processing of the negative elements (Lipski 2010(Lipski , 2017(Lipski , 2018a, use of the pluralizer ma (Cassiani-Obeso and Smith 2021; Lipski 2012Lipski , 2014Moñino 2007Moñino , 2013Schwegler 2007b), and overall performances with interviews and translation tasks (Lipski 2020a(Lipski , 2020b)" (Lipski 2020c, p. 3).…”