Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T02:55:56.003Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From “No, she does” to “Yes, she does”: Negation processing in negative yes–no questions by Mandarin speakers of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

Haoruo Zhang  and
Norbert Vanek Open the ORCID record for Norbert Vanek [Opens in a new window]
Haoruo Zhang
Affiliation:
College of Foreign Languages, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Norbert Vanek*
Affiliation:
School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In response to negative yes–no questions (e.g., Doesn’t she like cats?), typical English answers (Yes, she does/No, she doesn’t) peculiarly vary from those in Mandarin (No, she does/Yes, she doesn’t). What are the processing consequences of these markedly different conventionalized linguistic responses to achieve the same communicative goals? And if English and Mandarin speakers process negative questions differently, to what extent does processing change in Mandarin–English sequential bilinguals? Two experiments addressed these questions. Mandarin–English bilinguals, English and Mandarin monolinguals (N = 40/group) were tested in a production experiment (Expt. 1). The task was to formulate answers to positive/negative yes–no questions. The same participants were also tested in a comprehension experiment (Expt. 2), in which they had to answer positive/negative questions with time-measured yes/no button presses. In both Expt. 1 and Expt. 2, English and Mandarin speakers showed language-specific yes/no answers to negative questions. Also, in both experiments, English speakers showed a reaction-time advantage over Mandarin speakers in negation conditions. Bilingual’s performance was in-between that of the L1 and L2 baseline. These findings are suggestive of language-specific processing of negative questions. They also signal that the ways in which bilinguals process negative questions are susceptible to restructuring driven by the second language.

Keywords

negation processingyes–no questionscognitive restructuring in bilingualsMandarinEnglish
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , July 2021 , pp. 937 - 967
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Akiyama, M. M. (1979). Yes–no answering systems in young children. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 485–504.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Akiyama, M. M. (1992). Cross-linguistic contrasts of verification and answering among children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21, 67–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Akiyama, M. M., Brewer, W. F., & Shoben, E. J. (1979). The yes–no question answering system and statement verification. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 365–380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ammar, A, Lightbown, P, & Spada, N. (2010). Awareness of L1/L2 differences: Does it matter?. Language Awareness, 19(2), 129–146.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Athanasopoulos, P. (2011). Cognitive restructuring in bilingualism. In Pavlenko, A. (Ed.) Thinking and speaking in two languages (pp. 29–65). Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Athanasopoulos, P., Damjanovic, L., Krajciova, A., & Sasaki, M. (2011). Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(1), 9–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59, 390–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 255–278.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bolibaugh, C., Vanek, N., & Marsden, E. (2021). Towards a credibility revolution in bilingualism research: Open data and materials as stepping stones to more reproducible and replicable research. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (In press).Google Scholar
Brown, A., & Gullberg, M. (2010). Changes in encoding of PATH of motion in a first language during acquisition of a second language. Cognitive Linguistics, 21(2), 263–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bylund, E., & Jarvis, S. (2011). L2 effects on L1 event conceptualization. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(1), 47–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carpenter, P. A., & Just, M. A. (1975). Sentence comprehension: A psycholinguistic processing model of verification. Psychological Review, 82, 45–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, H. (2014). The answering system to yes–no truth-functional questions in Korean-English bilingual children. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 43, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Choi, S. (1991). Children’s answers to yes–no questions: A developmental study in English, French, and Korean. Developmental Psychology, 27, 407–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, H. H., & Chase, W. G. (1972). On the process of comparing sentences against pictures. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 472–517.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ćoso, B., & Bogunović, I. (2019). The role of linguistic cues in bilingual negation processing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23, 21–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dale, R., & Duran, N. D. (2011). The cognitive dynamics of negated sentence verification. Cognitive Science, 35, 983–996.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dudschig, C., & Kaup, B. (2018). How does “not left” become “right”? Electrophysiological evidence for a dynamic conflict-bound negation processing account. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44, 716–728.Google Scholar
Ernst, T. (1995). Negation in mandarin Chinese. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 13(4), 665–707.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischler, I., Bloom, P. A., Childers, D. G., Roucos, S. E., & Perry, N. W. Jr (1983). Brain potentials related to stages of sentence verification. Psychophysiology, 20, 400–409.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hasson, U., & Glucksberg, S. (2006). Does understanding negation entail affirmation? An examination of negated metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1015–1032.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, A. (2013). The syntax of answers to polar questions in English and Swedish. Lingua, 128, 31–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmberg, A. (2014). Answering yes/no-questions in English and other languages. The EFL Journal, 5, 23–42 Google Scholar
Holmberg, A. (2015). The syntax of yes and no. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horst, M., White, J., & Bell, P. (2010). First and second language knowledge in the language classroom. International Journal of Bilingualism, 14(3), 331–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, B., & Liao, X. (2007). Xiandai hanyu [Modern Chinese] (pp. 1–159). Higher Education Press.Google Scholar
Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaup, B., Lüdtke, J., & Zwaan, R. A. (2006). Processing negated sentences with contradictory predicates: Is a door that is not open mentally closed? Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1033–1050.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaup, B., Yaxley, R. H., Madden, C. J., Zwaan, R. A., & Lüdtke, J. (2007). Experiential simulations of negated text information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 976–990.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keating, G. D., & Jegerski, J. (2015). Experimental designs in sentence processing research: A methodological review and user’s guide. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levelt, W. J. (1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Li, D., & Cheng, M. (2008). A practical Chinese grammar for foreigners. Beijing Language and Culture University Press.Google Scholar
Lu, J. (2003). Xiandai hanyu yufa yanjiu jiaocheng [A Study Guide of Modern Chinese Grammar] (pp. 205–266). Beijing, China: Peking University Press.Google Scholar
Lüdtke, J., Friedrich, C. K., De Filippis, M., & Kaup, B. (2008). Event-related potential correlates of negation in a sentence–picture verification paradigm. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 1355–1370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Manning, G., Sabourin, L., & Farshchi, S. (2018). Negation Processing in L2 English Speakers. (Poster Presentation). Second Language Research Forum, Montreal.Google Scholar
McManus, K., & Marsden, E. J. (2019). Signatures of automaticity during practice: Explicit instruction about L1 processing routines can improve L2 grammatical processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 40(1), 205–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, J. M. (2015). Statistical significance testing in second language research: Basic problems and suggestions for reform. Language Learning, 65, 97–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Park, H. I., & Ziegler, N. (2014). Cognitive shift in the bilingual mind: Spatial concepts in Korean–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(2), 410–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. http://www.r-project.org/ Google Scholar
Tang, M., Vanek, N., & Roberts, L. (2021). Crosslinguistic influence on English and Chinese L2 speakers’ conceptualization of event series. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(1), 205–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
The Modern Chinese Corpus (PKU-CCL-CORPUS). Retrieved July 8, 2016 from http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/index.jsp Google Scholar
Tian, Y., Breheny, R., & Ferguson, H. J. (2010). Why we simulate negated information: A dynamic pragmatic account. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 2305–2312.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tian, Y., Ferguson, H., & Breheny, R. (2016). Processing negation without context – why and when we represent the positive argument. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 683–698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanek, N. (2020). Changing event categorization in second language users through perceptual learning. Language Learning, 70(2), 309–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanek, N., & Selinker, L. (2017). Covariation between temporal interlanguage features and nonverbal event categorisation. IRAL – International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 55, 223–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xiao, R. Z., & McEnery, A. M. (2008). Negation in Chinese: A corpus-based study. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 36(2), 274–330.Google Scholar