A Study on the Negation Effect in Classical Chinese Aphasia

摘要

Negative expression is common in natural languages but takes on different forms from one language to another, thus giving rise to different patterns in negative sentence comprehension. The current studies on negative sentences focus on the negation effect. However, whether the processing of negative sentences requires longer processing time or higher error rate is still controversial. Furthermore, negation effect has the explanatory power of the theory of the Pruning Hypothesis of Syntactic Tree and the Head Interference Hypothesis. Ten Chinese Broca's and Wernicke's aphasic patients were recruited in the current study. The results showed a negation effect in Chinese negative sentence processing. The experiment of Chinese negation effect proves that the Head Interference Hypothesis is more powerful in accounting for the negative sentence comprehension by classical Chinese aphasics.