Contrary to expectations: Does context influence the processing cost associated with negation?

Résumé En

This study aimed at investigating whether negation and affirmation behave similarly in supportive contexts. Both affirmative and negative sentences were designed around the mismatch between contextual expectations and sentence meaning: the denial of negative expectations lead to an affirmative sentence meaning whereas the denial of affirmative expectations lead to a negative sentence meaning. The discourse connectives activate, accommodate and reject the contextual expectations, rendering the utterances relevant and informative. In comparison with previous studies, in our study both affirmative and negative sentences presuppose the activation and rejection of the counterpart representation and the question under discussion for both polarities is whether p. Although the patterns of RTs tended to validate our prediction, the relevant interaction was not significant, showing that polarity and context do not influence each other. In other words, the supportive context does not seem to facilitate the processing of negation in the current setting. However, the processing difficulty associated with negation should be further investigated, as the RTs in the sensibility-judgement task include the time required for response decision and preparation and might not be ideal to capture differences in processing times.