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Can NEG placement have negative consequences (for efficient processing)? A bilingual test case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2018

JOHN M. LIPSKI
JOHN M. LIPSKI*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE John M. Lipski, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, 442 Burrowes Building, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA. E-mail: jlipski@psu.edu
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Abstract

The present study examines the relative processing efficiency of two typologically diverse configurations of sentential negation: immediately preverbal NEG and unbounded clause-final NEG. In order to effect a head-to-head comparison, the data are drawn from a bilingual speech community in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, in which two lexically cognate languages are in contact, differing principally in the placement of the sentential negator: Spanish (preverbal NEG) and the Afro-Hispanic creole language Palenquero (clause-final NEG). The results of a series of experiments suggest that preverbal negation is quite robust, while processing of clause-final negation is degraded under increased cognitive demands. Contextual and pragmatic cues ameliorate the processing of likely negative utterances, while unbounded clause-final negation is more vulnerable in ambiguous utterances. The contrasting behavior of Spanish and Palenquero negation highlights the possible role of processing mechanisms as contributing to typological differences among languages.

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Type
Original Article
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Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1147 - 1188
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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