Comprehension of negation with quantification

Three experiments were carried out to compare the processing of three kinds of affirmative and negative sentences and showed that explicit syntactic negatives and implicit syntactic positives were processed differently than semantic negatives which were referentially equivalent to few.

Abstract

Three experiments were carried out to compare the processing of three kinds of affirmative and negative sentences. In the first experiment, Ss were timed while they read a sentence, looked at a dot array, and then judged the sentence true or false with respect to the picture. The results showed that explicit syntactic negatives (e.g., None of the dots are red) and implicit syntactic negatives (e.g., Few …) were processed differently than semantic negatives which were referentially equivalent to few (e.g., A minority …). All three types of negatives took longer to verify than affirmatives. Two further experiments confirmed that Ss coded the arrays accompanying the implicit syntactic negatives (few) and semantic negatives (a minority) in terms of the larger and smaller subsets of dots, respectively, thus accounting for the difference in processing.