Novel ERP Evidence for Processing Differences Between Negative and Positive Polarity Items in German.

Mingya Liu,Jutta L Mueller,Peter König

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00376

Abstract

One unresolved question about polarity sensitivity in theoretical linguistics concerns whether and to what extent negative and positive polarity items are parallel. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), previous studies found N400 and/or P600 components for negative and positive polarity violations with inconsistent results. We report on an ERP study of German polarity items. Both negative and positive polarity violations elicited biphasic N400/P600 effects relative to correct polarity conditions. Furthermore, negative polarity violations elicited a P600-only effect relative to positive polarity violations. The lack of a graded N400 effect indicates that both kinds of violations involve similar semantic processing costs. We attribute the increase in P600 amplitude of negative polarity violations relative to positive polarity violations to their different nature: the former are syntactic anomalies triggering structural reanalysis, whereas the latter are pragmatic oddities inducing discourse reanalysis. We conclude that negative and positive polarity violations involve at least partly distinct mechanisms.

Highlights

How individual words are used and understood in a sentence depends on the narrow linguistic context as well as on the broad pragmatic context
We showed that differences were not due to negative or affirmative context alone and that Negative polarity items (NPIs) involve additional, presumably syntactic, costs compared to positive polarity items (PPIs)
The former are syntactic anomalies (Klima, 1964; Chierchia, 2004) triggering reanalysis of the sentence structure, whereas the latter are pragmatic oddities (e.g., Horn, 1989; Liu, 2017) that induce reanalysis of the discourse context

Summary

Introduction

How individual words are used and understood in a sentence depends on the narrow linguistic context (i.e., syntactic and semantic properties of the sentence) as well as on the broad pragmatic context (i.e., properties of the discourse where the sentence is embedded). Positive polarity items (PPIs) such as English already tend only to occur in affirmative contexts. (1c) is a well-formed sentence, but the negated sentence (1d) is odd Words such as English really are polarity-insensitive items (non-PIs), as they can occur in affirmative as well as negative contexts, e.g., (1e)/(1f). There is a close interaction of the usage of specific words and the positive or negative polarity of the context These differences between NPIs, PPIs and non-PIs have been confirmed in behavioral studies (e.g., Liu and Soehn, 2009; Richter and Radó, 2013) in terms of acceptability or naturalness ratings, which are widely used in psycholinguistics (e.g., Masia et al, 2017)

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