Incremental processing of postverbal negation: ERP evidence from Korean

Abstract

This study examines the processing of sentential negation in Korean, a head-final language, within pragmatically felicitous contexts. Using an ERP truth-value judgment task, we found evidence suggesting that when the negator follows a clause-final verb in Korean, the negation is processed incrementally after the affirmative representation has been formed. Fifty-six Korean speakers judged true affirmatives faster and more accurately than false affirmatives, while negative sentences elicited slower and less accurate responses for both true and false trials. Notably, ERP results revealed that only negative sentences elicited enhanced neural activity during the 300–500 ms time window, indicating increased processing costs compared to affirmatives. These results suggest that postverbal negation in Korean involves two-step processing: the negative marker is processed sequentially after the verb, following the initial formation of the affirmative representation of the clause, even in pragmatically licensed contexts. This underscores the significance of language-specific attributes such as the placement of a negator relative to the verb in understanding how negation is processed.