arXiv:2606.04340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A sentence like "The authors that no critics recommended have ever received acknowledgment for a best-selling novel" is sometimes rated as acceptable even though, strictly speaking, it is ungrammatical because the negative polarity word "ever" is not licensed where it is. This behavioral effect is sometimes called a "negative polarity illusion". Here we propose that the lossy context surprisal theory of Hahn et al. (2022) -- whereby people have an imperfect encoding of complex sentences -- might explain this effect. We hypothesize that people hav
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