Accessibility of negated constituents in reading and listening

Abstract

In two experiments conducted in French, we investigated the representation of negated constituents, focusing on their accessibility as antecedents for pronouns. Since only highly accessible discourse entities can serve as antecedents for simple pronouns, pronoun resolution preferences can reflect the degree of accessibility. In our first experiment, we analyzed fixation patterns of participants listening to sentence pairs like “I baked muffins not waffles last night. They will be eaten for breakfast/bought for breakfast”. Fixation patterns on four visually presented objects (the negated, the non-negated, a semantically related and an unrelated object) show that negated constituents were less accessible than non-negated ones, but by no means suppressed, since they were fixated reliably more often than both related and unrelated objects. In the second experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, we were able to show that the accessibility of a negated antecedent depends on the particular way it has been negated. Comparing ordinary negations and repair-like constructions (muffins, no, waffles), we found that anaphoric reference to the negated constituent takes less time when it is at the same time the more recent referent than when it is the more distant one in a repair like construction.