Incremental processing of negation

The present study seeks to investigate whether negation is incrementally comprehended in Korean. Many of previous behavioral and neurological studies have found delays and errors in the comprehension of English negation. However, more recent studies have reported that negative sentences are incrementally processed as fast and accurately as affirmative sentences, given a pragmatically felicitous context. This discrepancy suggests that the poor comprehension of negation is mainly due to the absence of a felicitous context. In line with this, our hypothesis was that pragmatic felicity could help negation processing by establishing expectancies for using negation. In an eye-tracking task, we found that twenty-four Korean-speaking participants were equally fast and accurate in comprehending both affirmatives and negatives within a discourse context. Fixation analyses further showed that shortly after hearing the verb in a scrambled sentence, participants distinguished between negative and affirmative interpretations. These findings support the hypothesis that given a felicitous context, negation is incrementally processed by rapidly using the polarity information of the verb.