Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German

Mueller

2021

J Psycholinguist Res

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Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.

Section: The Current Studysupporting

confidence: 86%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs

Schwab

Mueller

2021

J Psycholinguist Res

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“…Alternatively, the methods used here might be problematic. First, some of the fillers involve unlicensed polarity items, e.g., jemals ‘ever’ in positive sentences, which are ungrammatical (see Ladusaw, 1980 ; Giannakidou, 2011 ; Liu et al, 2019 ). This might have contributed to the ceiling effect for the wenn/falls sentences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

2021

Front. Psychol.

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Logical connectives in natural language pose challenges to truth-conditional semantics due to pragmatics and gradience in their meaning. This paper reports on a case study of the conditional connectives (CCs) wenn/falls ‘if/when, if/in case’ in German. Using distributional evidence, I argue that wenn and falls differ in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward the modified antecedent proposition at the non-at-issue dimension. This contrast can be modeled using the speaker commitment scale (Giannakidou and Mari, 2016), i.e., More committed<WENN p, FALLS p>Less committed. Four experiments are reported which tested the wenn/falls contrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019). Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wenn or falls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was that falls might be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice between wenn and falls in the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chose falls significantly more often than wenn in the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context, wenn was rated more natural than falls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) that falls led to lower speaker commitment ratings than wenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (including weil ‘because’ and wenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference between wenn and falls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019), where the wenn/falls difference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.

“…Their study investigates the question how polarity items are acquired by looking at 11- to 12-year-olds’ comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs. PPIs and NPIs are restricted in their distribution to contexts of the appropriate polarity (Liu et al, 2019 ), but the complexity in the exact characteristics that render particular contexts (anti-)licensing and the considerable variability in individual polarity items’ sensitivity to such contexts poses a challenge to language learners. Previous research based on sentence production data (Lin et al, 2015 , 2018 ; O’Leary & Crain, 1994 ; Tieu, 2013 ; Tieu & Lidz, 2016 ) suggest that children show an early sensitivity to the limited distribution of polarity items, although their knowledge of the set of licensing expressions grows more sophisticated with time.…”

Section: Research Topics At Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Dudschig

Kaup

et al. 2021

J Psycholinguist Res

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Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.