engleski

Cognitive processing of verbal quantifiers in affirmative and negative sentences

Studies from English and German languages showed differences in processing of positive and negative sentences with different quantifiers. Unlike Croatian, these languages don't allow null quantifiers in negative concord as common grammar structure, so we wanted to test weather this type of sentence is also processed differently. Picture sentence verification task was used to investigated comprehension of different quantifiers in the Croatian language: general quantifiers in affirmative sentence like "all", non-general quantifiers in compositional negations such as "not all", null quantifiers in negative concord like "none", as well as relative disproportionate quantifiers such as "some" in affirmative and negative sentences. For the purpose of the study, we divided a total of 30 participants into two groups, one group having the sentence replaced with a picture after 250ms and the other after 750ms. Participants were asked to read sentences shown on a screen and compare accuracy with the following picture. E-prime was used to measure reaction times and accuracy. In accordance with theories that more complex tasks require longer reaction time, non-general and null quantifiers, as well as negative sentences were processed significantly longer. Results were interpreted within the situational model of negation comprehension.

verbal quantifiers; negations; negative concord

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