An informativity-based account of negation complexity

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).