The Processing of Mandarin Chinese Conglai in Affirmative and Negative Propositions: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Conglai conveys the semantic feature of total quantification across the timespan from the past up to the present without exceptions. Some perspectives suggest that when conglai co-occurs with affirmative and negative propositions, the contextual discourse can modulate the quantified meaning of conglai – adjusting the scope of quantification to better align with the overall intent expressed in the statement. This study utilized event-related potential (ERP) techniques to investigate whether the semantic comprehension of conglai is influenced by different contextual information when co-occurring with affirmative or negative propositions. In terms of manipulating contextual cues, the experiment categorized contextual information into consistent (e.g., diligent children always arrive at class on time) and inconsistent (e.g., lazy children always arrive at class on time) contexts. According to the ERP results, the consistency of the context did not significantly affect the co-occurrence of conglai with affirmative and negative propositions. Co-occurrence of conglai with negative propositions elicited larger negative waves than co-occurrence with affirmative propositions. This finding demonstrates that in the negation sentences, participants need to expend more cognitive load, which makes the semantic computation process more complex. The quantified meaning of conglai played a dominant role when participants integrated the quantified meaning of conglai with contextual information.