The role of linguistic cues in bilingual negation processing

A vast body of research has dealt with negation processing. There are many differences between negations across languages, which could influence negation processing in bilingual speakers. However, bilingual negation processing has rarely been experimentally investigated. This study aims at exploring whether highly proficient Croatian-English bilinguals are able to adequately adopt English negations, and whether linguistic cues from both languages have similar effect on negation processing. A sentence–picture verification task was used to investigate the processing of affirmative sentences, sentential and constituent negations, Croatian negative concord and English sentences with negated subject. 2 (language) × 4 (sentence type) × 2 (congruency) ANOVA with repeated measures was used to analyze the data. The results showed that the effect of language was not significant, except in the case of constituent negations which were processed faster in English. There was a significant difference between the processing of affirmative and negative sentences, as affirmatives were processed faster than negatives in both languages. Constituent negations in both languages were processed slower compared with other types of negations. The results suggest that strong linguistic cues, such as word order and quantifiers, influence negation processing in both languages, resulting in differences between different types of negations. The results are discussed in the light of two existing models of negation and sentence processing. A new model, as a combination of these two models, is proposed. The fact that there was no significant difference in negation processing between the bilinguals’ two languages supports the view that highly proficient successive bilinguals are able to adequately adopt negations in both their languages