Speaker: Yosef Grodzinsky (The Hebrew University)
Title: High behavioral and neural selectivity in the processing of downward entailingness, and its theoretical implications
Time: Friday, May 10th, 3:30pm – 5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: (with I-An Tan)
A 50-year-old discovery, that Downward Entailing (DE) operators incur greater processing costs than their Upward Entailing (UE) counterparts (Just & Carpenter, 1971; henceforth the Monotonicity Effect) led to a series of psycho- and neuro-linguistic studies. These explored the manner by which DE operators license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). We took several steps: first, we conducted behavioral studies that showed that the Monotonicity Effect is highly robust and replicable, demonstrably independent from generic psychological factors such as word frequency, length, on-the-fly learning, delayed verification, and more (Deschamps et al., 2015; Agmon et al., 2023, passim). Second, an fMRI study localized the Monotonicity Effect anatomically in a small and neuroanatomically coherent region that is adjacent to, but excluding, the left hemispheric Brodmann Areas 44,45 (famously known as Broca’s region, Grodzinsky et al., 2020).
These studies served as backdrop against which we conducted our next investigation: Once the Monotonicity Effect was indexed behaviorally and anatomically, we could use these indices to determine the role of DE-operators as NPI licensors. NPI licensing conditions have long been debated, with syntactic and pragmatic factors weighing in. We conducted a series of behavioral studies with English and Hebrew speakers, hoping to obtain evidence for a precise characterization of these licensing conditions. We tested sentences with 2 DE operators, hosted in Homer’s (2020) flip-flop environments, and in a series of controls. To enable a coherent interpretation of our results, we defined a direct mapping from DE-domains to processing costs. We found that (i) the Monotonicity Effect is determined not by the number of DE operators, but rather, by the monotonicity of the minimal constituent in which they reside; and (ii) that DE-ness is not a property of operators, but of environments (Gajewsky, 2005; Tan et al., 2024).
Finally, we tested the same materials in fMRI (Tan et al., in prep.). Despite difficulties, we not only replicated previous results, but also, provided a new perspective on the neural bases of DE-ness. We show how our results bear directly on the current debate about the nature of monotonicity, and conclude with some speculations about the cognitive functions of the new brain area our studies uncovered.