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On truth and polarity in negation processing: Language-specific effects in nonlinguistic contexts
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Description: Research question: In response to negative yes-no questions (Doesn’t she like cats?), typical English answers (->Yes, she does/No, she doesn’t) peculiarly vary from those in Chinese (->No, she does/Yes, she doesn’t). If this crosslinguistic difference is associated with language-specific processing routines, to what extent do habitual processing change in Chinese-English sequential bilinguals? Methodology: Chinese-English bilinguals, English and Chinese monolinguals (N=40/group) were tested in a verbal experiment (Expt.1). The task was to answer positive/negative questions with time-measured yes/no button presses. The same participants were first tested in a nonverbal experiment (Expt.2), agreeing (press “↑”) or disagreeing (“↓”) with positive/negative equations using ‘=’/‘≠’ symbols (e.g. ▲≠■). For between-experiment comparability we converted yes-no questions into two geometric shapes and positive/negative polarity into ‘=’/‘≠’ symbols. Data and analyses: To analyse reaction-time data, we built mixed-effects regression models using the lme4 package (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) in the R software (Version 3.5.1; R Development Core Team 2018). Findings and conclusions: In Expt.1, bilinguals, like English monolinguals, were slowed down significantly less than Chinese monolinguals by negative questions compared to positive questions. These results suggest approximation of bilinguals to English-like processing of negation in negative questions. In Expt.2 too, bilinguals and English monolinguals were slowed down significantly less than Chinese monolinguals by negative equations compared to positive equations. These results are interpreted as evidence for earlier reported conceptual restructuring in the bilingual mind, which also extends to negation processing. Originality: This study innovatively investigated the processing of negation in Chinese-English bilinguals in verbal and nonverbal contexts. Significance: This paper provides new empirical evidence for bilingual cognition from a novel domain and extends current exploration in negation processing in monolingual speakers to bilinguals.