There is strong evidence that comprehenders can parse sentences in an incremental fashion. However, when the sentence contains a negation, the evidence is less clear. Previous work has shown that increasing the pragmatic felicity of a negative sentence reduces or eliminates any processing overhead relative to affirmative sentences. However, in previous work felicity has gone hand-in-hand with the predictability of critical material in a sentence. In three experiments reported here, we presented equally felicitous sentences with critical material of varying predictability (operationalised as the number of possible completions) to test whether this might be a critical factor determining the ease with which partial sentences containing a negation are interpreted. Participants completed a truth-value judgement task (Experiment 1) or a sentence completion task (Experiments 2 and 3) after viewing a visual environment that provided the context for a test sentence, which could differ in truth value (in Experiment 1 only), polarity (affirmative or negative), and number of possible completions (one, two, or three). In all three experiments, we recorded response times and accuracy, but also response dynamics via participants' computer mouse trajectories, allowing us to test specific hypotheses about the time course of comprehension. Across all experiments, in conditions with one or two possible targets, we observed consistent detrimental effects of negative polarity, suggesting that the difficulty in processing negation cannot be reduced to effects relating to predictability or pragmatic felicity. We discuss this finding in relation to incremental and two-stage models of processing and outline a new account of the processing difficulty arising from negation in terms of a conflict between what is locally activated on the basis of individual words and phrases and the global meaning of a negative sentence.

中文翻译：

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带有“是”的“否”：否定句处理的鼠标跟踪研究。

有充分的证据表明，理解者可以以递增的方式解析句子。但是，当句子包含否定词时，证据就不太清楚。先前的工作表明，增加否定句的实用性会减少或消除相对于肯定句的处理开销。但是，在以前的工作中，恰当性与关键材料在句子中的可预测性息息相关。在这里报道的三个实验中，我们用具有不同可预测性的关键材料（操作为可能完成的数量）来呈现同样恰当的句子，以测试这是否可能是决定包含否定词的部分句子易于解释的关键因素。参加者在查看提供测试句子上下文的视觉环境后，完成了真值判断任务（实验1）或句子完成任务（实验2和3）（仅在实验1中），极性（肯定或否定），以及可能完成的次数（一，二或三）。在所有三个实验中，我们记录了响应时间和准确性，而且还通过参与者的计算机鼠标轨迹记录了响应动态，从而使我们能够测试有关理解时间过程的特定假设。在所有实验中，在具有一个或两个可能目标的条件下，我们观察到了一致的负极性有害影响，这表明处理否定的难度不能降低为与可预测性或实用性相关的影响。