Processing Negative Polarity Items: When Negation
      Comes Through the Backdoor

Drenhaus, Heiner; Frisch, Stefan; Saddy, Douglas

doi:10.1515/9783110197549.145

Cited by 121 publications

(86 citation statements)

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“…A possible criticism of the empirical basis of the intrusion effect is that the data come from only two experiments involving the speeded grammaticality judgment task (Drenhaus et al, 2005, carried out the experiment twice, once combined with an ERP experiment). However, the intrusion effect has been replicated and extended for English by another laboratory using the rapid serial visual presentation task (Xiang, Dillon, & Phillips, 2006).…”

Section: Modeling Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…). The reason is that in the previous experiments by Drenhaus et al (2005), participants were unable to process sentences with two NPI licensors, rendering the results difficult to interpret: The first three NPI conditions need no further explanation. The PPI conditions were included in order to explore the model's behavior with a different kind of polarity item.…”

Section: Stimuli and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…This replication was conducted as part of an event-related potentials (ERP) study (Drenhaus et al, 2005). The main finding was that, compared to the grammatical condition (2a), both the inaccessible licensor (2b) and no licensor (2c) conditions showed N400 and P600 components at the Table 1 Judgment accuracies and reaction times in the (Drenhaus, Saddy, & Frisch, 2005) NPI jemals. Because the N400 component, in general, reflects semantic integration problems and violations of selectional restrictions and implausibility (Kutas & Petten, 1994); and because the P600 component reflects syntactic reanalysis and repair (Friederici, 1995(Friederici, , 2002, increased syntactic complexity and ambiguity (Friederici, Hahne, & Saddy, 2002;Frisch, Schlesewsky, Saddy, & Alpermann, 2002;Kaan, Harris, Gibson, & Holcomb, 2000), the results suggested that an NPI occurring in an illegal environment results in both semantic and syntactic processing problems compared to their licensed counterparts (also see Drenhaus, beim Graben, Saddy, & Frisch, 2006).…”

Section: The Intrusion Effectmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In the Drenhaus et al (2005) experiment, participants saw the matrix DP, the embedded DP, and each of the other words in isolation for 300 msec each. A blank screen was presented for 100 msec between each presentation; 500 msec after the last word of the sentence was presented, participants had to judge the acceptability of the sentence within a maximum of 3,000 msec; 1,000 msec after their response, the next trial was presented.…”

Section: Polarity Licensing Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, there does not exist any competence theory of polarity licensing (nor any implemented computational model thereof) that can generate probabilistic, non-deterministic grammaticality decisions, which is a prerequisite for explaining the Drenhaus et al (2005) accuracy patterns.…”

Section: Explaining the Intrusion Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

et al. 2008

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A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue-based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue-based retrieval model: Partialcue matches-which constitute a kind of similarity-based interference-can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow-downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters.

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Section: Modeling Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Stimuli and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: The Intrusion Effectmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Polarity Licensing Dependenciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Explaining the Intrusion Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

et al. 2008

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Scenarios of Equivalence: The Case of Quelque

Jayez

Tovena

2012

Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages

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The French existential determiner quelque is examined in relation to the notion of equivalence. This notion, formalised as Equity in (Jayez and Tovena, 2008), is the explicit characterisation of a widespread intuition concerning free choice and epistemic items, according to which members of a set are presented as equivalent with respect to some relevant criterion or dimension. Equivalence is a unifying notion that enables us to embrace the different aspects of the distribution of quelque and turn them into a coherent whole. The paper discusses the epistemic component of quelque and draws attention to its evidential property, which is exploited in accounting for the subtle interplay between the determiner and the types of nouns it combines with. It is then argued that the seeming positive polarity of quelque derives from the conventionalised effect of a processing interaction between its existential quantifier status and the epistemic implicature it conveys. By taking into account the pressure of processing mechanisms on the stabilisation of use, we are able to explain the otherwise puzzling fact that several epistemic determiners with unrelated morphology in different languages exhibit a converging behaviour with respect to negation. Finally, a closer look at diachronic data reveals that the anti-specificity of quelque is present already in the early stages of the life of the item.

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Aligning Grammatical Theories and Language Processing Models

Lewis

Phillips

2014

J Psycholinguist Res

123

114

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We address two important questions about the relationship between theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. First, do grammatical theories and language processing models describe separate cognitive systems, or are they accounts of different aspects of the same system? We argue that most evidence is consistent with the one-system view. Second, how should we relate grammatical theories and language processing models to each other?

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Processing Negative Polarity Items: When Negation Comes Through the Backdoor

Cited by 121 publications

References 0 publications

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

Processing Polarity: How the Ungrammatical Intrudes on the Grammatical

Scenarios of Equivalence: The Case of Quelque

Aligning Grammatical Theories and Language Processing Models

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