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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]
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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
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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