Negative polarity illusions are robust with both 'ever' and 'any' (when linear position is held constant)

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Linguistics

Background:

• Linguistic illusions are vital for understanding incremental language comprehension.
• Negative polarity items (NPIs) are frequently used to study these illusions.
• Previous research showed illusions with 'ever' but not 'any', questioning theoretical generalization.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the generality of linguistic illusions across different NPIs.
• To determine if 'any' is susceptible to the illusion when linear position is controlled.
• To differentiate between lexical variation and structural explanations for illusion occurrence.

Main Methods:

• A higher-powered study was conducted comparing 'ever' and 'any'.
• Test sentences were adapted from Parker and Phillips (2016) to equalize NPI ordinal position.
• Linguistic illusion susceptibility was measured for both NPIs.

Main Results:

• Comparable linguistic illusions were observed for both 'ever' and 'any'.
• The findings contradict the hypothesis of fine-grained lexical variation in illusion susceptibility.
• The results align with a distance-based explanation for the absence of illusions in prior studies.

Conclusions:

• The susceptibility to this linguistic illusion generalizes across tested NPIs.
• The findings support structural explanations over lexical variation for illusion occurrence.
• This reconciles previous conflicting results and strengthens current models of language comprehension.