Negation Grant Experiment 2

The study employs the same basic design as Blanchette & Lukyanenko 2019a (psycnet.apa.org) to investigate whether dialect differences exist in the processing of certain types of negative sentences. Three participant groups (speakers of African American English, Appalachian English, and Mainstream English) will read sentences with a negative subject immediately preceding a negated auxiliary, such as "nobody didn't watch the game". Critical sentences will be preceded by a single context sentence that biases the reader toward either a single negation ('nobody watched') or a double negation ('everybody watched') interpretation. Participants' eye movements will be tracked during reading, and inferences about relative processing difficulty will be drawn from observations of reading patterns.