A Review of the Research on Cognitive Mechanism of the Processing of Chinese Negative Sentences

Abstract

Negation is an essential concept in human languages. Traditional studies of negation were focused on the analysis of its structure and function. In recent years, the research on the processing of Chinese negative sentences had been in the ascendant. Based on the extant literature, this paper first generalized a series of related theories about negative processing, and then analyzed the four influencing factors of the processing of negation as follows: types of negative sentences, context, emotion and individual differences. Finally, it pointed out that more attention should be paid to expanding the research objects, conducting the second language studies of the negative sentence processing, and integrating new experimental methods in future research.