From No, she does to Yes, she does: On the conceptual changes in the processing of negative yes-no questions by Chinese-English bilinguals

Negation in English and Mandarin Chinese exhibit a peculiar difference. In response to negative yes-no questions (e.g. Doesn’t she like cats?), the typical English answers (->Yes, she does/No, she doesn’t) substantially vary from those in Chinese (->No, she does/Yes, she doesn’t). What are the processing consequences of these markedly different conventionalised linguistic responses to achieve the same communicative goals? Is this crosslinguistic variation associated with measurably different cognitive demands when English and Chinese speakers process negation in a nonverbal context? Does L1 linguistic patterns influence L2 expression? If so, do they also change thinking that goes beyond overt language use in bilinguals? These questions are addressed here with innovative verbal and nonverbal experiments. The findings suggest language-specific processing of negation, and are interpreted as novel support for linguistic relativity. The results also suggest that the ways in which bilinguals process negative questions changed their L1-based habitual processing of negation in a nonverbal context.