L2ers’ comprehension of different types of negation in English NPI licensing: An ERP study

Abstract

This paper exploits the sensitivity of negative polarity items (NPIs) to negation to inspect the time course of processing different types of negation by Korean English L2ers. The elicitation of N400 in the ERP experiment with the issue at stake in this paper reveals that like L1 speakers, L2ers in online sentence processing can rapidly recognize negative meaning from different sources, say, from asserted, explicit negation (i.e. negation in the yntactic-semantic representation) and non-asserted, implicit negation (i.e. pragmatically inferred negation in the complement of emotive predicates). At the same time, we observe that unlike L1 speakers, Korean English L2ers cannot carry out the second phase of the integration-involving NPI licensing process. The absence of late P600 in the unlicensed and the emotive predicate conditions suggests that unlike L1 speakers, L2ers stop short of terminating grammatical NPI licensing in the face of asserted, explicit negation. Nor can they enter into the analogous second phase of sanctioning NPIs in the face of pragmatically inferred negation.