Speaker: Jeremy Hartman (UMass Amherst)
Date & Time: February 3rd at 3:30 pm
Place: Education Bldg. rm. 433
Title: Negation and factivity in acquisition and beyond
Abstract:
In this talk, I present joint work with Magda Oiry on the interaction between negation and two types of factive predicates in acquisition. Following work by Léger (2008), we examine children’s understanding of sentences with the factive predicates know and be happy, in combination with negation–in the matrix clause, as well as in the embedded clause. In addition to an asymmetry in the understanding of know vs. be happy, we find a new and revealing pattern of errors across different sentence-types with know. We also show that a similar error pattern is found even with adult subjects. I discuss how these findings relate to recent work on the processing of negation.