The Negation Gap in ESL

Miseon Lee1*, William O’Grady2, Gayoung Lee1

1
Hanyang University,
2
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Abstract
The present study examines how Korean-speaking learners of
English as a second language understand English ‘bi-negative’
sentences, which contain both not and a negative pronoun (e.g., No
one didn’t cry, I didn’t do nothing). A semantic similarity judgment
task demonstrates that native speakers of English clearly accept
patterns of this type and assign them an affirmative interpretation.
However, the same task reveals that our 31 Korean participants are
largely unaware of this usage and reject the affirmative meaning
of the bi-negative sentences. A translation experiment involving
a different group of 32 Korean-speaking learners reveals a strong
tendency to interpret the bi-negative patterns as if they were the
sort of negative concord pattern typical of Korean. These results
suggest the presence of first-language transfer, even among
advanced speakers.

Key words: bi-negatives, negative concord, judgment task,

translation task, Korean-speaking learners of English

1. Introduction

Negation is a crucial component of communication. Found in all

Received 30 October 2022; Revised 21 December 2022; Accepted 22 December 2022

* Correspondence: mlee@hanyang.ac.kr
Journal of Cognitive Science 23(4): 525-544 December 2022
©2022 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University
526 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

languages, it is an essential part of any second-language curriculum,

including of course the teaching of English in Korea.
The first and most common way to negate a sentence in English makes
use of the word not (often contracted to n’t), which has the effect of denying
the occurrence of a situation or event. We will henceforth refer to this as
‘sentential negation.’

(1) Harry didn’t eat.

A second option, less common but still widely used, makes use of a
negative pronoun (also sometimes called a ‘negative quantifier’) that
denotes a null set. We will refer to this option as ‘argument negation.’

(2) a. No one cried.

b. Harry did nothing.

A somewhat similar pair of options is available in Korean.

(3) Sentential negation:

Youngswu-ka (pap) an mek-ess-ta.
Youngswu-NOM (meal) not eat-PAST-DECL
‘Youngswu didn’t eat.’

(4) Argument negation:
a. Amwuto an wul-ess-ta.
Anyone not cry-PAST-DECL
‘No one cried.’
b. Cheolswu-ka amwukesto an mek-ess-ta.
Cheolswu-NOM anything not eat-PAST-DECL
‘Cheolswu didn’t eat anything.’
 The Negation Gap in ESL 527

However, there is also a major difference between the two languages,

since Korean allows the use of a negative pronoun only in the presence
of sentential negation – the morpheme an in the case of (3) and (4). The
following sentences are thus unacceptable.4

(5) Argument negation without sentential negation:

a. *Amwuto wul-ess-ta.
b. *Cheolswu-ka amwukesto mek-ess-ta.

This feature of Korean reflects a well-known typological option known as

‘negative concord’ (e.g., Giannakidou & Zeijlstra 2017; Zeijlstra 2004).

(6) Negative Concord

A negative pronoun must be accompanied by sentential negation.

There is no such requirement in English, where negative pronouns can

stand alone without the need for sentential negation, as illustrated in (2)
above. Crucially, however, this does not mean that there is a prohibition
against the co-occurrence of a negative pronoun and sentential negation in
English. Quite to the contrary, sentences such as the following are perfectly
acceptable.

(7) No one didn’t clap. (= Everyone clapped.)

Context: That was a really impolite crowd. A lot of people didn’t even
clap when the guest speaker finished his talk.
Response: Not true. No one didn’t clap. (i.e., Everyone clapped.)

1
An alternative way to express negation involves the ‘long form’ -ci anhta, which
we will set to the side for the purposes of this paper.
528 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

(8) I didn’t do nothing. (= I did something.)

Context: You wasted your entire day. You did exactly nothing.
Response: I didn’t do nothing – I cut the grass. (i.e., I did something.)

The acceptability of such patterns, which we will henceforth refer to as

‘bi-negatives,’ has been commonly noted in the literature on negation (e.g.,
Blanchette & Lukyanenko 2019:9; Horn 2010; Maldonado & Culbertson
2021; Thornton et al. 2016:1; Zeijlstra 2004:58-59).

Double Negation [i.e., a bi-negative] becomes natural in the proper

context, namely when it is a response to a previous statement containing a
negation.
(Zeijlstra 2004:58-59)

The function of double negation [i.e., a bi-negative] in conversational

contexts … is to correct a previous utterance.
(Thornton et al. 2016:1)

These observations run counter to a tendency in various English-

language textbooks to ignore patterns of this type by either treating them as
ungrammatical or classifying them as instances of non-standard speech. The
following excerpts exemplify this tendency.

‘Standard English does not permit double negation.

I didn’t buy no books. (non-standard)’
(Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1999:194)

‘With nothing/nobody etc., we do not use a negative verb (isn’t, didn’t etc.):
I said nothing. (not I didn’t say nothing)’
(Murphy 2019:172)
 The Negation Gap in ESL 529

In fact, comments of this sort properly apply only to an entirely different

type of pattern in which a sentence such as I didn’t do nothing is taken to
mean ‘I did nothing.’ Such patterns, which were the norm in Middle English
and are still common in various non-standard varieties of Modern English
(e.g., Robinson & Thoms 2021), manifest a version of negative concord
similar to what we see in Korean: a negative pronoun calls for sentential
negation. We will not consider these patterns further here, focusing instead
solely on contemporary standard English.
The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we will report on a study,
to be described below, that we conducted in order to confirm that native
speakers of English do in fact accept bi-negative sentences in their language
and that they assign them an affirmative interpretation. Second, we report
on the results of two experiments that we conducted with Korean college
students in order to determine whether and how they interpret English
bi-negative patterns – a question that is essentially unexplored in the
literature on second language acquisition.

2. Methods

2.1 Experiment 1: L1 judgment task

As a first step, a semantic similarity judgment task was conducted. Its
purpose was to explore whether native speakers of English accept the
affirmative meaning of bi-negative patterns in their language.

2.1.1. Participants
A total of 20 native speakers of English took part in a semantic similarity
judgment task to provide a baseline against which to assess the performance
of second-language learners. The participants ranged in age from 19 to 70
years (mean age = 45.1 years, 7 males); all were college graduates or college
students. They had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no known
530 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

history of neurological, psychiatric, or language disorders. All participants

gave informed written consent in accordance with the requirements of our
Institutional Review Board (IRB), but were unaware of the purpose of the
study. They received monetary compensation for their participation.

2.1.2. Materials
There were a total of 40 critical test items, 10 for each of the four critical
conditions exemplified below in Table 1. Half of these items contained
just one negative – either the negative pronoun no one in subject position
or the negative pronoun nothing in direct object position. The other half
were bi-negative patterns, with the sentential negative not in addition to the
negative pronoun in the subject or direct object position. As exemplified in
Table 1, each sentence was paired with another sentence that had roughly
the same meaning.

Table 1. Examples of critical items

Paired semantically
Condition Test sentence
similar sentence
Mono-negative with …
subject no one No one cried all day. Not a single person cried all
day.
direct object nothing She often read nothing. She often didn’t read anything.

Bi-negative with …
subject no one No one didn’t cry Everyone cried during the
during the movie. movie.
direct object nothing Actually they didn’t do They actually did something.
nothing.

An additional 40 items were included as fillers in each experimental

session in order to minimize the possibility that participants might realize
 The Negation Gap in ESL 531

the purpose of the experiment. Ten fillers contained a sentential negative

along with the determiner any (e.g., We didn’t make any money). The
remaining thirty sentences contained no negative at all (e.g., They studied at
the library). Ten of the affirmative sentences had roughly the same meaning
as the paired sentence. All other filler sentences differed in meaning from
the sentence with which they were paired.
The open-class words used in the stimuli were all high-frequency items
(mean freq = 485.27 per million, based on the Corpus of Contemporary
American English, Davies, 2008). Two counterbalanced lists were created
using a Latin square design, each including 20 critical items (5 tokens per
condition) and 40 fillers. The stimuli were pseudo-randomized within each
list and across participants, ensuring that no critical item was presented
twice in a row and that there was a minimum of two intervening filler trials
between critical trials.

2.1.3. Procedure
A semantic similarity judgment task was created and implemented
using the PsyToolkit platform (Stoet, 2010, 2017). Each trial began with a
fixation cross displayed at the center of the monitor for 500 milliseconds
(ms). Then a stimulus consisting of a pair of sentences was presented in a
centered position on the monitor. For each trial, participants were instructed
to indicate whether the two sentences had roughly the same meaning by
pressing the key designated as “Same” or “Different.” Once the participant’s
response was registered or after a maximum duration of 10 seconds, the
task automatically proceeded to the next trial.
The test session began by presenting the procedural instructions on the
computer monitor. Five practice pairs were then given to familiarize the
participants with the task. The whole experiment lasted about 10 minutes
on average. Responses (indicated by pressing a button) were recorded for
subsequent statistical analysis.
532 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

2.1.4. Results
The participants judged the two sentences in each pair of critical items as
having the Same meaning in the majority of cases, as documented in Table
2. A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with two within-subjects
factors: Negation type (mono-negative, bi-negative) and Location of the
negative pronoun (subject, object). The results showed no main effects of
Negation type (F(1, 19) = 2.42, p > .1) or Location (F(1, 19) = 3.24, p > .05).
The interaction between the two factors was also not significant (F(1, 19) =
3.10, p > .05).

Table 2. Number of critical pairs that native speakers judged as Same (Mean
percentage and SE in parentheses)

Mono-negative Bi-negative
With Subject no one 97/100 (97%, SE=1.8) 90/100 (90%, SE=5.7)
With Direct Object nothing 96/100 (96%, SE=2.0) 83/100 (83%, SE=5.9)
193/200 (97%, SE=3.0) 173/200 (87%, SE=3.2)

2.1.5. Discussion
Our findings confirm a very strong tendency for native speakers of
English to assign an affirmative interpretation to bi-negative constructions.
Even in the absence of a supporting context, 90% of the subject patterns
and 83% of the object patterns received this reading.

2.2 Experiment 2: L2 judgment task

2.2.1. Participants
A total of 31 native speakers of Korean took part in the same semantic
similarity judgment task. One participant was removed from the analysis
due to scores 2.5 SDs below the group mean. We were left with 30
participants (mean age = 24.3 years, 14 males), all of whom had started
 The Negation Gap in ESL 533

learning English as a second language before puberty, but only in an

academic context.
At the time of the experiment, the participants were undergraduate
students at a university in Seoul. They were divided into three groups
according to their English proficiency, as determined by their TOEIC or
TOEFL scores. Based on the standard score ranges established by the
TOEIC committee, 8 participants were identified as advanced learners
(TOEFL iBT scores of 95 or better, or TOEIC scores of 945 or better), 12
as high-intermediate (TOEFL iBT scores ranging from 68 to 94, or TOEIC
scores ranging from 785 to 944), and 10 as low-intermediate learners
(TOEFL iBT scores ranging from 42 to 67, or TOEIC scores ranging from
550 to 784). All participants gave informed written consent as required by
our IRB, but were unaware of the purpose of the study.

2.2.2. Materials and Procedure

Experiment 2 made use of the same materials and procedures employed
in Experiment 1, except that the instructions at the beginning of the test
session were presented in Korean.

2.2.3. Results
The number of critical pairs that Korean participants judged as ‘Same’ is
reported for each proficiency group in Table 3. Of particular relevance are
the mean scores for the bi-negative constructions, which were far below
those of mono-negative constructions – 50% compared to 78% in the case
of subject patterns and 46% versus 91% in case of the object patterns.
534 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

Table 3. Number of critical pairs that Korean participants judged as Same

(Mean percentage and SE in parentheses)

Mono-negative Bi-negative
With Subject no one
Advanced (N=8) 37/40 (93%, SE=5.3) 21/40 (53%, SE=15.1)
High-intermediate (N=12) 50/60 (83%, SE=8.2) 26/60 (43%, SE=9.9)
Low- intermediate (N=10) 30/50 (60%, SE=8.5) 28/50 (56%, SE=12.4)
Subtotal 117/150 (78%, SE=4.8) 75/150 (50%, SE=6.8)
With Direct object nothing
Advanced (N=8) 40/40 (100%) 28/40 (70%, SE=9.3)
High-intermediate (N=12) 56/60 (93%, SE=8.0) 21/60 (35%, SE=9.6)
Low- intermediate (N=10) 41/50 (82%, SE=5.5) 20/50 (40%, SE=8.5)
Subtotal 137/150 (91%, SE=3.9) 69/150 (46%, SE=5.9)
254/300 (85%, SE=3.1) 144/300 (48%, SE=4.5)

A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with three factors: Negation

type (mono-negative, bi-negative), Location of negative pronouns (subject,
object), and Proficiency (high, lower). The results showed a main effect of
Negation type (F(1, 27) = 31.33, p < .001), with the scores for the mono-
negative patterns significantly higher than for the bi-negative patterns (85%
versus 48%). There was no main effect of Location of negative pronouns
(F(1, 27) = 1.49, p > .1), which had a score of 64% for conditions with
the subject no one and 69% for conditions with the direct object pronoun
nothing. The interaction between the two factors was also not significant (p
> .1).
The effect of Proficiency was significant (F(2, 27) = 3.96, p = .031).
Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc tests traced this effect to the fact that
acceptance of an affirmative interpretation was significantly higher for the
advanced learners’ native-like performance on mono-negatives and the low-
intermediate learners’ poor performance on bi-negatives (ps < .001).
 The Negation Gap in ESL 535

2.2.4. Discussion
In sum, Korean learners of English, including those who are at an
advanced level, accept the affirmative interpretation of English bi-negative
patterns only about half the time – 50% of the time when there is a subject
negative pronoun and 46% when there is object negative pronoun. These
scores are far lower than those for mono-negatives (78% and 91.3%,
respectively), clearly pointing to a fundamental gap in the L2 learners’
knowledge of English bi-negatives.
These findings raise a new question. Given that Korean learners of
English reject the standard interpretation of bi-negative sentences, what
meaning (if any) do they assign to these patterns? We turn to this question
next.

2.3 Experiment 3: Translation task

An experiment was devised to address the question at hand. The key task
involved having native speakers of Korean translate English bi-negative
patterns into Korean.

2.3.1. Participants
A total of 35 native speakers of Korean who had not participated in
Experiment 2 took part in an English-to-Korean translation test. Three
participants were removed from the analysis due to accuracy scores 2.5 SDs
below or above the group mean, leaving 32 participants (mean age = 24.5
years, 12 males). All the participants had been born and raised in Korea,
and were undergraduate students at a university in Seoul who had started
learning English as a second language before puberty in a school context.
Based on the standard score ranges established by the TOEIC committee,
ten participants were identified as advanced learners (TOEFL iBT scores of
95 or better, or TOEIC scores of 945 or better), and 20 as high-intermediate
learners (TOEFL iBT scores ranging from 68 to 94, or TOEIC scores
536 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

ranging from 785 to 944).3 All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and
no known history of neurological, psychiatric, or language disorders. They
gave informed written consent as required by our IRB, but were unaware of
the purpose of the study. They received modest monetary compensation for
their participation.

2.3.2. Materials and Procedure

A timed translation task was designed and presented using the PsyToolkit
platform (Stoet, 2010, 2017). The target test items and fillers were identical
to the mono- and bi-negative sentences used in Experiments 1 and 2.
The test session began with the appearance of a fixation cross at the
center of the monitor, followed by the presentation of a single sentence.
Participants were instructed to translate each sentence into Korean to the
best of their ability in the way they would speak in casual conversations.
Once the participant finished typing a translation of the sentence or after a
maximum duration of 30 seconds, the next test item automatically appeared.
At the beginning of the experimental session, procedural instructions
were presented in Korean on the computer monitor. Before the actual test
session began, two practice trials were given to familiarize the participants
with the task. The entire experiment lasted about 30 minutes on average.
For the purposes of our analysis, two raters independently judged the
translated sentences as ‘correct’ if they captured the negative meaning
of English mono-negative sentences and the affirmative meaning of
bi-negative sentences, as illustrated in Table 4. Interrater reliability (Cohen’s
kappa) was very high (0.91). Disagreements were resolved by discussion
between the two raters.

3
Given that even the advanced learners differed to a high degree from native
speakers in their acceptance of the affirmative meaning of bi-negative patterns in
Experiment 2, we did not include low-intermediate learners in Experiment 3.
 The Negation Gap in ESL 537

Table 4. Examples of accurate translations

Condition Test sentence* Sample correct translation4

Mono-negative with
subject no one No one cried. Amwuto wul-ci anh-ass-ta.
anyone cry-COMP not.do-PAST-
DECL
direct object nothing She read nothing. Kunye-nun amwukesto ilk-ci anh-
ass-ta.
she-TOP anything read-COMP not.
do-PAST-DECL
Bi-negative with
subject no one No one didn’t cry. Motwu-ka wul-ess-ta.
everyone-NOM cry-PAST-DECL
direct object nothing They didn’t do Kutul-un mwuenka-lul hay-ss-ta.
nothing. they-TOP something-ACC do-PAST-
DECL
*Adverbials are not shown here due to space limitations.

2.3.3. Results
Our accuracy measure corresponded to the proportion of correct
translations of critical items. The mean accuracy for the critical conditions
was 57.7% (SE = 4.2%), which was much lower than the mean accuracy for
the fillers 96.7% (SE = 2.3%). Table 5 summarizes the mean accuracy for
each of the critical conditions.

4
We also judged translations of bi-negatives as ‘correct’ if they contained two
negative forms: for example, amwukesto an-po-n kes-un anita for ‘They didn’t see
nothing.’
538 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

Table 5. Mean accuracy of English-to-Korean translation (SE in

parentheses)

Mono-negative Bi-negative Mean

With Subject no one 100 (0) 5.6 (3.3) 52.8 (6.1)
With Direct object nothing 98.1 (1.4) 26.6 (6.9) 62.5 (5.7)
Mean 99.1 (0.7) 16.3 (39) 57.7 (4.2)

A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with three within-subjects

factors: Negation type (mono-negative, bi-negative), Location of negative
pronouns (subject, object), and Proficiency (advanced, high-intermediate).
The results revealed that the effect of Proficiency was not significant, nor
was the interaction among the three factors (ps > .1).
In contrast, there was a main effect of Negation type on translation
accuracy (F(1, 30) = 373.56, p < .001) in that the mono-negative test items
elicited a significantly higher rate of accuracy (99.1%) than the bi-negative
patterns (16.3%). The effect of Location of negative pronouns was also
significant (F(1, 30) = 5.06, p = .03): the accuracy for the direct object
conditions (62.5%) was significantly higher than for the subject conditions
(52.8%).
The interaction between the two factors was significant (F(1, 30) = 7.63,
p = .01). Bonferroni-corrected paired t-tests revealed that performance
was more accurate for the mono-negative patterns than for both of the
bi-negative patterns (ps < .001). Moreover, the accuracy for the object
bi-negative pattern was significantly higher than for the subject bi-negative
pattern (27% versus 6%; p = .005).
The translations for mono-negative patterns that were judged as ‘correct’
varied with respect to the type of negative construction – the ‘long-form’
negative -ci anhta or the ‘short-form’ an, which Lee (2010:211) describes
as ‘approximately synonymous.’ The majority of the correct translations
(294/317 (92.7%)) employed the long-form negative, as exemplified in
 The Negation Gap in ESL 539

Table 4. The remaining correct translations involved an (16 instances) as

illustrated in (9a) below, in addition to certain other less common forms of
negation (7 instances).
Only 52 translations of the English bi-negative patterns were judged to
be correct. Fifteen of them (28.9%) made use of the quantifier motwu ‘all’
for the subject bi-negatives and mwuenka ‘something’ for object patterns, as
illustrated in Table 4. The majority of the correct translations (39/52 (75%))
contained double negative forms, as illustrated in (9b).

(9) Examples of correct translations

a. S
 ample correct translation of the English mono-negative He drank
nothing:
Ku-nun amwukesto an masi-ess-ta.
he-TOP anything not drink-PAST-DECL
‘He didn’t drink anything.’
b. S
 ample correct translation of the English bi-negative He didn’t do
nothing:
Ku-ka amwukesto ha-ci anh-un kes-un anita.
he-NOM anything do-COMP not thing-TOP be.not-DECL
‘It’s not that he didn’t do anything.’

An analysis of errors indicated that the vast majority of inappropriate

responses (263 of 267) involved interpreting bi-negatives as simple
negatives, as illustrated below in (10). (The remaining four errors all
involved failures to respond within the 30-second time limit.)
540 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

(10) Examples of erroneous translations of bi-negative sentence

a. With subject negative pronoun: No one didn’t cry.
Translation: Amwuto wul-ci anh-ass-ta.
anyone cry-COMP not.do-PAST-DECL
‘No one cried.’
b. With object negative pronoun: She didn’t do nothing.
Translation: Kunye-nun amwukesto ha-ci anh-ass-ta.
she-TOP anything do-COMP not.do-PAST-DECL
‘She didn’t do anything.’

2.3.4. Discussion
The translation data confirm that Korean ESL learners reject the standard
affirmative interpretation of English bi-negative sentences. Whereas native
English speakers take patterns such as No one didn’t cry to mean (roughly)
‘Everyone cried,’ the Korean ESL learners interpret them as a simple
negative (‘No one cried’) in the vast majority of cases. A similar but weaker
tendency occurs for object bi-negatives such as She didn’t do nothing, for
which the preferred translation was the Korean equivalent of ‘She did
nothing’ rather than ‘She did something.5 Clearly, then, exposure to English
bi-negative patterns creates very significant confusion for Korean second
language learners.

3. General Discussion and Conclusion

The experiments described in this paper support three conclusions.

First, as revealed by the results of our judgment task with native speakers
of English, it is overwhelmingly clear that they accept bi-negative patterns
and routinely assign them the interpretations reported in the literature on

5
We set to the side for now the question of why performance on the subject
patterns was somewhat lower than on the object patterns.
 The Negation Gap in ESL 541

English negation. (That is, they take No one didn’t cry to mean ‘Everyone
cried’ and I didn’t do nothing to mean ‘I did something.’)
Second, it is also overwhelmingly clear that even advanced Korean-
speaking learners of English as a second language are often unaware of
bi-negatives and their usage. As we have seen, the participants in our second
experiment commonly rejected the match between bi-negative patterns and
the paraphrases with which they were paired. This points to a substantial
gap in the proficiency of college-level learners of English.
These gaps in the proficiency of even advanced learners of English can
almost certainly be traced to the lack of exposure to bi-negative patterns.
The English curriculum that is followed throughout Korea makes no
mention of bi-negative patterns. Our search of 54 English textbooks that
are widely used in middle schools and high schools (published by NE
books, YBM, Chunjae Education Inc. and Visang) found no instances
of bi-negatives. Various popular commercial reference books for high
schoolers (e.g., HB Grammar published by Chunjae Education Inc.) also
do not explain or exemplify bi-negative patterns. Tellingly, the two most
popular machine translators (i.e., Naver Papago, Google Translate) produce
incorrect translations for bi-negatives.
Third, our translation experiment demonstrated that Korean-speaking
learners of English manifest a strong tendency to interpret English
bi-negatives as if they were the sort of negative concord pattern typical
of Korean – a classic example of first-language transfer. The result is the
interpretation normally associated with mono-negative sentences in English:
No one didn’t cry is wrongly taken to mean ‘No one cried’ and I didn’t do
nothing is misinterpreted as ‘I did nothing.’
These findings constitute a promising starting point for further study.
Important experimental work on the acquisition of different negative
patterns has been done by Thornton et al. (2016), who compared the
interpretive preferences of adults and 3- to 5-year old children. The test
542 Miseon Lee, William O’Grady, and Gayoung Lee

items in their study consisted of sentences embedded in contexts that were

compatible with both a ‘double-negative’ (bi-negative) interpretation and
a negative-concord reading. Whereas the adult participants favored the
double negative interpretation, the children manifested a preference in the
opposite direction.
In contrast, little is known about developmental preferences in second-
language settings. The study of Korean-speaking ESL learners is of
particular interest since the negative concord patterns of their first language
bear a superficial resemblance to the bi-negative constructions of English,
creating the challenges that are reflected in our results and raising questions
about how they might ultimately be resolved. These are among the issues
that we are exploring in ongoing work on this subject and the tangled web
of phenomena related to it, employing a variety of online measures.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Miho Choo and two anonymous reviewers for
their comments and advice.

Funding This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea
and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019S1A5A2A03053390).

Declarations

Ethics Approval This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the
University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Consent to Participate and Consent for Publication All participants gave informed
written consent in accordance with the requirements of the Institutional Review Board.

Conflict of Interest The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.

 The Negation Gap in ESL 543

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