The pragmatics of negation in language comprehension and memory

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Language comprehension is always contextualized. Psychological theories differ with respect to the role they give context in the moment-by-moment processing of language. With National Science Foundation support, William Levine will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the role of context in language comprehension. The project will focus on a common linguistic device that is heavily dependent on context for its interpretation: negation. Consider how the statement "I am not lazy" sounds in a context in which one has been accused of being lazy versus how odd it would sound if no such accusation exists. Using a highly-accurate eye-tracker to monitor people's eye-movements as they read sentences, the experiments are designed to assess the processes by which readers make use of contextual information when the contextual motivation for negation is or is not obvious. Readers' memory and comprehension of negation will be assessed under these conditions as well. The broader aim of the project is to work toward building a general theory of comprehension that specifies the role of context in the processing of language for all aspects of comprehension (e.g., syntactic, semantic). The significance of the project will be realized by individuals in enterprises such as computer communications. The more fully-specified a theory of human language processing is, the more effectively machines can communicate. Moreover, the further development of such theories holds the promise of improving educational programs of many kinds, including teaching and remediating reading skills in children, as well as improving literacy programs for adults.