Investigating the influence of boundedness and negation during reading

Abstract

It has previously been suggested that a bounded adjective (e.g., dead) must be interpreted as its antonym (e.g., alive) when negated (e.g., not dead), in contrast, unbounded entities (e.g., wide) when negated, an unbounded entity (e.g., not wide) can refer to multiple states and is not necessarily interpreted as its antonym (e.g., narrow). How readers interpret such expressions is largely unknown. Accordingly, the research within this thesis investigated the processing of boundedness in four experiments. Experiment 1a-c used off-line judgment tasks to assess whether readers were sensitive to boundedness when judging negated sentences. These showed readers judged bounded negation as similar to its antonym, whereas unbounded negation is seen as being less similar than their antonym. Experiment 2 used eye movements to investigate on-line processing of boundedness. Experiment 3 examined the influence of bounded on the facilitatory effect of connectives on establishing discourse coherence. Experiment 4 investigated the specificity of representations of bounded and unbounded negation. By measuring eye movements, we can gain insights into the on-going cognitive processing that is occurring during the reading of text. Eye movements have been used extensively to help us to understand the cognitive processing that occurs during reading, but there has been very little research into how our reading differs when we read bounded and unbounded negation. In this thesis the influences of boundedness on reading is examined. Bounded items appear to be interpreted as categorical, whereas unbounded items are interpreted in a more ambiguous manner. These experiments are the first to provide evidence that boundedness has an early influence on the online processing of negation during natural reading.

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