C05

Project Overview

Research on sentence processing suggests that adults have more difficulty processing negative than affirmative sentences (Kaup et al. 2006; Dale & Duran 2011). However, most supporting studies use out-of-the-blue sentences, where negative and affirmative sentences are not truly comparable, because negatives depend more strongly on prior discourse (Wason 1972). When an appropriate discourse context is provided, the processing cost difference between affirmative and negative sentences disappears (Lüdtke & Kaup 2006). This project investigates children’s interpretation (off-line comprehension), processing (on-line comprehension), and production of negation when negative sentences occur in supportive discourse contexts.

Research Questions & Theoretical Framework

Linguistic structures that are hard for adults to process are typically acquired later by children (Phillips & Ehrenhofer 2015). This pattern is visible with negation: 4- and 5-year-olds often perform poorly on tasks requiring the processing and interpretation of negative sentences (e.g., Wojtecka et al. 2013; Nordmeyer & Frank 2014). Yet these tasks are usually non-ecological and lack discourse context. Given the known benefits of discourse for adult negation processing, children’s difficulties may partly reflect task design rather than a deep grammatical deficit (Reuter et al. 2018). It is still unclear to what extent appropriate discourse contexts also facilitate children’s processing and interpretation of negation. Two outcomes are possible. If prior discourse helps children handle negation, then the acquisition gap between affirmative and negative sentences should largely disappear once discourse is controlled. If, instead, children lack the cognitive resources needed to integrate discourse information, then affirmative–negative asymmetries should remain, even with appropriate context. The results will clarify how negation interacts with discourse and, more broadly, how a truth-reversal operator interfaces with the grammatical system, consistent with the Neg-Only Hypothesis.

Methodologies & Data

This research will examine truth-functional negation in 3- to 5-year-old monolingual German children, focusing on their sensitivity to discourse conditions that promote the use and correct interpretation of negation. Using a sentence-completion task, a speeded picture-matching task, and an eye-tracking experiment, it will test how far children integrate sentence-level and discourse-level information and whether prior discourse leads them to anticipate an upcoming affirmative or negative sentence. The project will also assess whether particular contextual configurations of negation facilitate its interpretation and processing in both adults and children. This study will prepare the ground for subsequent project phases, in which we will explore how German-speaking children’s acquisition of negation relates to other discourse-sensitive phenomena (such as scrambling) and extend the work to bilingual children. Because bilinguals are known to integrate discourse into sentence interpretation differently from monolinguals, they provide an ideal test case for the potentially facilitative role of discourse in the processing of negation.