Abstract
There are two contending models regarding the processing of negation: the fusion model and the schema-plus-tag model. Most previous studies have centered on negation in languages such as English and Mandarin, where negators are positioned before predicates. Mongolian, quite uniquely, is a language whose negators are post-verbal, making them natural replicas of the schema-plus-tag model. The present study aims to investigate the representation process of Mongolian contradictory negative sentences to shed light on the debate between the models, meanwhile verifying the post-verbal effect of negators. A series of experiments using the sentence–picture verification paradigm supports the fusion model: (i) Mongolian contradictory negative sentences were processed by representing the actual conditions rather than the negated state of affairs at 250 ISI (interstimulus interval of 250 ms), and (ii) despite the fact that a post-verbal effect of negators was measured at 250 ISI when Mongolian and Mandarin negative sentences were compared, Mongolian–Mandarin bilinguals adopted the same representational strategy for contradictory negation in both languages.
Highlights
For syntactic processing, negative stand-alone sentences can be divided into two types: contradictory negative sentences from which syntactic features the actual conditions can be explicitly inferred and non-contradictory negative sentences from which syntactic features the conditions cannot be inferred
This suggests that when processing Mongolian and Mandarin contradictory negative sentences, the actual state rather than the negated state will be active even at 250 interstimulus intervals (ISIs), and the actual state remains active at 750 and 1,500 ISI
This is consistent with the findings on English (Mayo et al, 2004) and Mandarin contradictory negations (Ping et al, 2014); both studies support the fusion model of negation processing
Summary
Negative stand-alone sentences can be divided into two types: contradictory negative sentences from which syntactic features the actual conditions can be explicitly inferred and non-contradictory negative sentences from which syntactic features the conditions cannot be inferred. Kaup et al (2006, 2007a), using the sentence–picture verification paradigm to investigate negation processing, indicated that for both contradictory and noncontradictory negative sentences, negation-incongruent schemas were represented at 250 ISI and negation-congruent schemas at longer ISIs, which supports the dual-step hypothesis. Gao et al (2011) focused on Mandarin contradictory negations with a sentence–picture verification paradigm Their results indicated a congruency effect with the actual conditions was found at 250 ISI, which again supports the fusion model. If post-verbal negators are integrated spontaneously with predicates to form negation-congruent schemas that represent the actual conditions at 250 ISI [despite Mongolian negations’ structural equivalence to the dual-step model as suggested by the study of Foroni and Semin (2013) on Dutch], it would be a strong evidence in support of the fusion model. EXPERIMENT 1: MENTAL REPRESENTATION AT THE INITIAL STAGE OF NEGATION PROCESSING OF MONGOLIAN–MANDARIN BILINGUALS
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