Colloquium with Jiwon Yun (Stony Brook University)

Title: Illusory Licensing of Negative Polarity Items in Korean 

Abstract: A growing body of psycholinguistic research has documented illusory licensing effects for negative polarity items (NPIs) in the presence of a structurally unavailable licensor (e.g., *The proposal that nobody supported will ever pass), offering a window into how grammatical constraints and conflicting processing cues interact during sentence comprehension. Previous studies have focused primarily on languages with retrospective NPI licensing (e.g., English), reporting enhanced acceptability and processing facilitation in illusory configurations, but only in restricted environments involving particular NPIs and embedded clause structures. This talk presents a series of experiments on Korean, a language with prospective NPI licensing. The results reveal a distinctive pattern. In offline judgments, Korean showed robust illusory licensing effects, with illusory licensors enhancing acceptability across different NPIs and embedded clauses. During online processing, however, illusory configurations increased processing difficulty. The Korean data suggest that the directionality of NPI licensing may play an important role in comprehension and that grammatical illusions need not be associated with processing facilitation. These findings provide new insights into the nature of illusory licensing, particularly with respect to accounts based on retrospective dependency formation (e.g., cue-based retrieval).