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An informativity-based account of negation complexity.

Ming Xiang¹, Alex Kramer², Ann E Nordmeyer³

¹Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

|May 5, 2020

Summary

Negative sentences require more processing than affirmative ones. Informativity, not just expectation, drives negation comprehension cost, especially when context aligns with the question.

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Negative sentences incur higher processing costs than affirmative sentences during comprehension.
Pragmatic context significantly influences negation comprehension cost, but its precise role remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate two pragmatic accounts of negation comprehension cost: expectation-based and informativity-based.
To determine whether contextual expectation or informativity is the primary driver of negation processing costs.

Main Methods:

Conducted four behavioral experiments to assess sentence comprehension.
Manipulated pragmatic context to evaluate its effect on processing negative sentences.

Main Results:

Findings indicate that informativity, rather than contextual expectation, is more directly linked to negation comprehension.
Contextual expectation influences negation comprehension cost only when it supports the relevant question under discussion.

Conclusions:

Informativity plays a more direct role in the cognitive processing of negation than contextual expectation.
The interplay between pragmatic context and negation comprehension is nuanced, depending on the alignment with the question under discussion.