Language specificity in the processing of affirmative and negative sentences

It is agreed that understanding a negative sentence elicits additional neural responses in reversing the truth of an embedded affirmative proposition. However, this argument is challenged by previous neuroimaging studies when distinct languages are used. Therefore, we intended to explore the language specificity of affirmative and negative sentence processing in this study.We recruited a group of Chinese-English bilinguals to conduct a grammar judgment task of affirmative and negative sentences during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. And we kept syntactic complexity/sentence length matched in both affirmative and negative sentences.We found that negative sentences elicited more activation in the perisylvian region, which supported the 'truth reversing hypothesis' and argued the reversing process was implemented by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The significant language-by-sentence interaction effect in the inferior prefrontal cortex and rostral prefrontal cortex showed that sentential negation was influenced by distinctive language expression.These results demonstrated the 'truth reversing hypothesis'. Further analysis revealed the effect of language expression on the neural mechanism of sentential negation.