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Quadruplex Negatio Invertit? The On-Line Processing of Depth Charge Sentences

So-called “depth charge” sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be ignored) are interpreted by the vast majority of speakers to mean the opposite of what their compositional semantics would dictate. The semantic inversion that is observed for sentences of this type is the strongest and most persistent linguistic illusion known to the field (Wason & Reich, 1979). However, it has recently been argued that the preferred interpretation arises not because of a prevailing failure of the processing system, but rather because the non-compositional meaning is grammaticalized in the form of a stored construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010; Fortuin, 2014). In a series of five experiments, we investigate whether the depth charge effect is better explained by processing failure due to memory overload (the overloading hypothesis) or by the existence of an underlying grammaticalized construction with two available meanings (the ambiguity hypothesis). To our knowledge, our experiments are the first to explore the on-line processing profile of depth charge sentences. Overall, the data are consistent with specific variants of the ambiguity and overloading hypotheses while providing evidence against other variants. As an extension of the overloading hypothesis, we suggest two heuristic processes that may ultimately yield the incorrect reading when compositional processing is suspended for strategic reasons.


INTRODUCTION
Most English native speakers interpret the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored to mean that All head injuries, no matter how trivial they appear, should be treated (Wason & Reich, 1979). The compositional semantics of the sentence, however, would dictate that it means All head injuries should be ignored, even if they seem trivial enough to treat. The commonly observed transformation of the nonsensical but correct meaning into a sensible but incorrect one is known as the depth charge effect. Wason & Reich (1979) speculated that three factors contribute to the meaning reversal: 1. The presence of (arguably) up to four negations: The initial no introduces a negative existential quantification over the entire clause. The particle too implicitly negates the following infinitive (X is too Y to Z → X should not Z). The word trivial can, as Wason & Reich (1979) argue, be analyzed as meaning not serious. Finally, the verb ignore arguably means not treat. 1 It is well known that multiple negation increases processing difficulty and causes misinterpretations (Sherman, 1976). 2. The absurdity of the scale invoked by too trivial to be ignored, which implies that something can be so trivial that one should not ignore it (compare trivial enough to be ignored, where the scale makes sense). 3. The incompatibility of the compositionally correct meaning (Ignore all head injuries) with world knowledge: Based on their experience, most people would agree that even minor head injuries are or at least can be a reason for concern. Wason & Reich (1979) propose that these factors conspire and cause a switch from compositional to non-compositional processing. Specifically, Wason & Reich (1979) suggest that the stacking of four negations may "overload" the reader's working memory 2 , with the other two factors -absurdity of the evoked scale and world knowledge -contributing to consistent misinterpretation. We call this the overloading account. Furthermore, Wason & Reich (1979) hypothesize that the final verb ignore is the point where the sentence becomes impossible to analyze compositionally and the switch occurs.

Previous empirical studies of the depth charge effect
In a series of small-sample experiments, Wason & Reich (1979) found that 4 out of 10 subjects were unable to assign the correct meaning to the depth charge construction even when world knowledge and lexical factors were taken out of the equation (No WUG is too DAX to be ZONGED), and that misinterpretation was more easily avoided when the compositional meaning agreed with world knowledge (gauged introspectively by the authors). The latter finding matches the observation of Fillenbaum (1974) that readers apply "pragmatic normalization" to sentences such as Don't print that or I won't sue you! in order to turn the compositionally nonsensical meaning into one that conforms with their a priori expectations about sensible propositions (see also Sanford & Sturt, 2002). Natsopoulos (1985) and Kizach et al. (2015) investigated the depth charge effect in Greek and Danish, respectively. In his first study, Natsopoulos (1985) used eight depth charge sentences as stimuli, finding that none of his 64 subjects were able to derive the compositional meaning. Whether a sentence evoked "strong beliefs" or not did not influence the incidence of meaning reversal, contrary to Wason & Reich's finding. In a second study, when subjects were asked to pick a paraphrase out of three options, the compositionally correct (absurd) meaning was chosen about 50% of the time. The third experiment yielded some evidence that "strong beliefs" in favor of the illusory meaning led to more incorrect interpretations. Natsopoulos (1985)'s studies used only a small number of items, and show a high level of variability between these: Some sentences were parsed correctly by a majority of subjects while others were almost always parsed incorrectly. Nevertheless, the results suggest that pragmatic reasoning can strengthen the depth charge effect while providing explicit paraphrasing choices will at least partly cancel it.
The experiment of Kizach et al. (2015) (29 subjects, 150 sentences) varied the three factors originally noted by Wason & Reich (1979) -number of negations, internal consistency of the scale and pragmatics -independently. Each stimulus sentence was followed by a conclusion, e.g. No head injury is too trivial to be ignored. Therefore, we rarely treat head injuries. Participants were asked to judge whether the conclusion made sense given the premise. After each judgment, they were also asked if their answer had been a guess. Results showed that participants resorted to guessing more often when negation was present on the adjective and the verb. However, even in the depth charge condition, where all three critical factors were present, participants' self-reported guessing rate was only about 20%, suggesting that subjects did not experience conscious processing failure on most trials. The depth charge condition showed the lowest comprehension accuracy (around 40%), followed by sentences with only a world knowledge violation (about 55%), the negation condition (about 65%), and finally the scale violation condition (about 75%). These results imply that the inverted meaning becomes entrenched once it has been generated, given that confidence in the erroneous interpretation is high, and that the world knowledge factor is a stronger driver of the inversion than the scale violation factor.
Furthermore, the results of Kizach et al. (2015) imply that not all of the problematic factors that are present in the classic depth charge configuration studied by Wason & Reich (1979) are necessary in order to obtain the meaning inversion effect. For instance, the "negation" of the adjective does not appear to be a prerequisite for meaning inversion, as examples of depth charge sentences without negative adjectives can be found in reallife corpora (e.g. No challenge is too big to stop us from saving our children from polio), as also observed by (Fortuin, 2014, p. 253f.). The overloading account therefore needs to accommodate the possibility that three negations may, in some circumstances, be enough to trigger meaning inversion. 3 O'Connor (2015,2017) conducted another series of experiments in English investigating the contribution of the multiple negations to the depth charge effect. Results showed that especially the combination of global negation (no head injury . . . compared to all head injuries . . . ) and the element too (compared to enough) led to a superadditive increase in misinterpretations, though a possible additional effect of adjectival negation was not investigated.

An alternative view: The ambiguity hypothesis
In opposition to the overloading account of Wason & Reich (1979), some scholars argue that there is a fundamental ambiguity to the meaning of sentences of the form No X is too Y to Z, and that one of the available meanings is the inverted meaning (Cook & Stevenson, 2010;Fortuin, 2014). We call this account the ambiguity hypothesis. There are two variants of the ambiguity hypothesis that make somewhat different sets of predictions. The first variant is proposed in the form of a computational model by Cook & Stevenson (2010). It shares with the account of Wason & Reich (1979) the prediction that the final verb of the sentence is the source of the depth charge effect, as its polarity ("negative" or "positive") presumably signals which meaning of the No X is too Y to Z construction is intended. Furthermore, this version of the ambiguity hypothesis predicts that world knowledge should not have an effect on meaning inversion, as the information given by the verb is assumed to be sufficient to derive the intended meaning. The second variant of the ambiguity hypothesis is proposed by Fortuin (2014). It assumes that the origin of the depth charge effect lies before the lexical verb, when the word too is processed. Unlike the account of Cook & Stevenson (2010), Fortuin's account predicts that the plausibility of the presumably intended meaning can affect interpretation, as readers are assumed to use their world knowledge to identify the correct version of the stored construction. Fortuin (2014) analyzes the classic depth charge configuration No X is too Y to Z as "[a] conventionalized combination of form-meaning elements" (p. 250), in the vein of construction grammar (e.g. Fillmore, 1985;Goldberg, 1995;Lambrecht, 1988; see also Cook & Stevenson, 2010). Using examples from real-life corpora, Fortuin (2014) argues that the construction can attain either a "negative" or a "positive" meaning. In Fortuin's terminology, "negative" meanings are cases in which inversion occurs, but as both meanings are properly licensed by the use of the construction, there is no "illusion" involved. For instance, the preamble No detail is too small . . . is shown to license both the continuation . . . to be ignored as well as its semantic opposite . . . to pay attention to with little change in the resulting meaning, as long as the context implies that details are important (p. 272). Fortuin (2014) also gives the example No detail is too small to escape his notice or merit his attention, where a "positive" and a "negative" reading are apparently licensed simultaneously (p. 275). Fortuin (2014) concentrates on the presumed communicative (or rhetorical) intention behind the depth charge sentence. The "negative" version of the construction is arguably produced if the intent is for the reader (or hearer) to draw a negative inference. In the classic No head injury is too trivial to ignore example, the intended message is arguably that head injuries should not be ignored. On the other hand, if the writer (or speaker) intends a positive inference, he or she will accordingly produce the "positive" version (e.g. No idea is too silly to discuss → discuss all ideas, p. 272). From a processing perspective, this leaves the receiver with the (possibly challenging) task of reasoning about the intention of the utterer, which must be inferred from the context and the lexical items used. However, the task may be rendered less difficult by the fact that most instances of the construction can be identified as being "positive" or "negative" based on the lexical verb alone: The computational model of Cook & Stevenson (2010) reaches 88% classification accuracy using only the lexical features of the verb.

Open questions
Researchers' continued interest in the depth charge effect is likely due to the fact that it calls compositionality itself into question, which is a provocation for every formal-minded linguist; after all, without a rule system that determines possible interpretations, language Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 dissolves into "semantic soup" (Anderson, 2006). 4 The provocation becomes even greater when, as already observed by Wason & Reich (1979), both laypeople and fellow linguists stubbornly insist that they are interpreting the sentence normally and correctly. Here, it should be noted that the observed ability of the construction to attain both "negative" and "positive" meanings does not necessitate the assumption that this behavior is sanctioned by grammar, as assumed by the ambiguity hypothesis: Despite the observation that meaning inversion sometimes occurs and sometimes does not, and is not limited to sentences with four negations, the depth charge effect may nevertheless be a performance-rather than a competence-driven phenomenon (Chomsky, 1964), as claimed by the overloading hypothesis.
The ambiguity hypothesis of Fortuin (2014) and Cook & Stevenson (2010) draws explanatory force from construction grammar, which assumes complex, pre-compiled meanings as its central tenet. Interestingly, among the authors who argue for a processingbased explanation of the depth charge effect, none have proposed an explicit formal mechanism by which the unlicensed meaning in depth charge sentences is derived. One theory by O'Connor (2015) is that "comprehenders interpret implicit negation [introduced by too] as semantically inert [...] thus conflating the logical force of two or more negative elements of the sentence" (p. 168), based on Horn's (2009) general observation that multiple negation is often not interpreted as expected. Under the overloading hypothesis, one possible account is that the implicit negation is dropped from memory when the mental capacity limit is reached, resulting in the erroneous meaning. It is thus possible that processing difficulty is reduced when overloading is triggered compared to when a fully compositional interpretation is computed, given that fewer negations have to be taken into account. If the intuition of Wason & Reich (1979) is correct, such an effect should become visible at the final "negative" verb.
An alternative view is that subjects enter into a different mode of processing when compositional semantics fails. This mode may be driven by world knowledge and possibly semantic associations between the lexical items in the sentence. It could be envisioned as treating the sentence as a "bag-of-words" rather than as an internally structured utterance (no + head injury + trivial + ignore ≈ Ignore no trivial head injury). If this seems extreme, note that in computational natural language processing, negation also poses a challenge (Wiegand et al., 2010), but respectable accuracy in sentiment detection (between 80% and 90%) can be achieved using bag-of-words or local n-gram representations (Ng et al., 2006;Pang et al., 2002). This suggests that, especially when applied in tandem with general world knowledge, such representations may often be sufficient to ensure successful communication (e.g. Jackendoff & Wittenberg, 2014). In terms of on-line processing, treating the sentence as less structured than it actually is would also predict reduced processing difficulty in depth charge sentences, given that the compositional computation of meaning is likely more effortful than using a bag-of-words approach. The ambiguity hypothesis makes the same prediction, given that the No X is too Y to Z construction does not receive a (fully) compositional interpretation when the inference is negative.
If overloading is the correct explanation for the depth charge effect, there may be individuals with enough cognitive capacity to overcome the challenge posed by depth charge sentences. It has been suggested that high working memory capacity can help subjects overcome retrieval difficulties during the completion of verb-argument dependencies in high-interference contexts (King & Just, 1991;Nicenboim et al., 2016), and that individuals with low working memory capacity may construct less detailed syntactic representations of sentences, as evidenced by their reduced sensitivity to garden-path structures (von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2013). High working memory capacity could also help subjects avoid overload in depth charge sentences and preclude the resulting switch from compositional to non-compositional processing that is thought to bring about the illusion. Note, however, that overloading of the reader's working memory is only one possible way in which the failure of compositional processing can be thought of. We will propose a variant of the overloading hypothesis that does not rest on the assumption of memory overload, but instead assumes that readers arrive at a limit to their intrinsic motivation and apply a "stop rule" (e.g. Simon, 1972), after which they switch to non-compositional processing. This account fits in well with the "good enough" approach to language processing (e.g. Christianson, 2016), which assumes that readers do not always construct complete and detailed mental representations of linguistic input, especially when such representations are difficult to derive.
The point of contention between proponents of the overloading hypothesis (Kizach et al., 2015;Wason & Reich, 1979) and those of the ambiguity hypothesis (Cook & Stevenson, 2010;Fortuin, 2014) is not whether the inverted meaning of depth charge sentences is fully compositional in nature or not: Both accounts assume that the inverted meaning cannot be derived by combining the lexical meanings of the words in the sentence according to a rulebased system. The disagreement is about whether the inverted reading is, fundamentally, due to an error in the processing system or whether it is, despite its non-compositionality, licensed by grammar by way of a pre-stored construction with different meanings. As noted by Cook & Stevenson (2010), under a construction-based approach the inverted reading is not a bug but a feature: As opposed to being an edge case in terms of compositional processing, the depth charge configuration is seen as increasing the expressive power of the grammar beyond the compositional interpretation. 5 Note, however, that the assumption of a stored construction does not mean that there is no compositional processing whatsoever in depth charge sentences. Constructions may be grammaticalized to different degrees, and thus show different degrees of compositionality (Trousdale, 2012). Furthermore, in order for the construction to be understood in the intended way, it first needs to be recognized, which should only be possible after at least some of the words in the sentence have been read and analyzed compositionally. 6 5 In a sense, depth charge sentences can also be seen as "ambiguous" under the overloading hypothesis, because both the compositional and the inverted meaning can be derived without the comprehender noticing an error. However, this type of (subjective) ambiguity is more "accidental" in nature (O'Connor, 2017) and not sanctioned by grammar. 6 In research on idiom processing, the related concepts of the idiom keya word in the sentence that signals the presence of an idiomatic expression, such as be in seventh (heaven) (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988) and the idiom's recognition pointthe point where most readers have access to the idiomatic meaning (Cacciari & Corradini, 2015) are used to make predictions about when compositional processing is suspended. It is not clear what the recognition point of the No X is too Y to Z construction is under the ambiguity hypothesis. Based on the account of Cook & Stevenson (2010), it should lie at the lexical verb, that is, at the very end of the sentence.

Contributions of the present work
Below, we present a series of four on-line experiments and one off-line experiment in German, as well as a sketch of possible non-compositional heuristics that may explain the depth charge effect. The main theoretical accounts to be investigated are the overloading hypothesis of Wason & Reich (1979)  knowledge, our experiments are the first to investigate the depth charge effect using online measures such as reading times and eye-tracking data. While previous experimental investigations have yielded valuable information regarding the final interpretation of depth charge sentences, our studies are designed to also shed light on how and when these interpretations arise during processing. Experiment 1 tests whether the depth charge effect can be observed during on-line processing. Here, participants read depth charge as well as control sentences and assigned ratings of perceived sensibleness. Experiment 1 shows that depth charge sentences cause no additional processing difficulty compared to sentences with fewer negations, consistent with a partly non-compositional interpretation mechanism. Experiment 2A (eye tracking during reading) tests the prediction that the verb of the complement clause is the source of the illusion, either because it introduces the final negation (Wason & Reich, 1979), or because it signals the intended meaning of the construction (Cook & Stevenson, 2010). Experiment 2A also investigates whether readers with high working memory capacity are more resistant to the illusion, which would be expected if the depth charge effect is due to memory overload. Results are compatible with the final verb being the source of the effect, but show no evidence of working memory capacity having an influence on meaning inversion. Thus, Experiment 2A does not support the account put forward by Wason & Reich (1979) as a specific instance of the overloading assumption. Experiment 2B investigates whether world knowledge plays a role in meaning inversion, as predicted by the overloading account as well as by one version of the ambiguity hypothesis (Fortuin, 2014). Experiment 2B suggests that world knowledge does indeed affect the magnitude of the meaning inversion effect. Experiment 3 tests whether the depth charge illusion generalizes beyond the classic No X is too Y to . . . construction to related constructions (e.g. No X is so Y that . . . ). In contrast to the ambiguity account, the overloading account predicts that the illusion occurs more generally with multiple negation. Results suggest that the effect generalizes and occurs with equal strength as long as the element too is present, thus providing evidence against a strong version of the ambiguity hypothesis. As a possible extension of the overloading account, we propose two candidate heuristics, negation cancellation and negate the verb, that may be involved in creating the depth charge effect. Finally, Experiment 4 is a sentence completion study that serves as a more stringent test of the claim that the origin of the illusion lies at the verb. In contrast to the results from Experiment 2A, Experiment 4 shows that meaning inversion reliably occurs when the verb is missing.
To summarize, we find that non-compositional processing of depth charge sentences can be detected in on-line measures, and that the final verb is likely not the source of meaning inversion. Furthermore, we find that the depth charge effect is influenced by world knowledge, but find no evidence that high working memory capacity grants partial immunity to the effect. Finally, our results show that the depth charge effect generalizes to other constructions besides the No X is too Y to Z construction.

EXPERIMENT 1
Both the overloading hypothesis (Wason & Reich, 1979) and the ambiguity hypothesis (Cook & Stevenson, 2010;Fortuin, 2014) predict that non-compositional processing should occur in depth charge sentences. The main purpose of Experiment 1 is to establish whether this non-compositional processing can be made visible using an on-line processing paradigm, as previous empirical studies only provided off-line data. We use a twofold approach to detect non-compositional processing: By varying the number of negations in the sentence, we can test whether processing difficulty increases monotonically with each added negation, as would be expected under compositionality. In addition, by having participants assign ratings of sensibleness to each sentence, we can probe if incongruous sentences are "normalized" to have a sensible meaning when the depth charge effect occurs.
In our experimental design, we manipulated negation on the adjective as well as global negation of the sentence in potential depth charge configurations. As noted earlier, a negated or otherwise "negative" adjective is not a prerequisite for meaning inversion. However, looking at the data provided by Fortuin (2014, p. 268) as well as the results of Kizach et al. (2015), it appears that the presence of a "negative" adjective significantly increases the likelihood of the sentence receiving a "negative" (that is, inverted) interpretation.

Method
Participants Twenty native speakers of German were recruited from the local student population. Subjects either received credit points or were paid e5 as compensation.

Materials
We constructed 32 items according to the design in (1). The presence of global negation as well as negation of the adjective were manipulated according to a 2 × 2 scheme. In 26 out of 32 items, adjectival negation was signaled by the presence of an overt negative affix such as un-or -less on the adjective.
(1) Global negation absent, adjectival negation absent (no negation) a. Manch eine Kopfverletzung ist zu gefährlich,ūm ignoriert zu werden. Some a head injury is too dangerous to ignored to get "Some head injuries are too dangerous to be ignored." Global negation absent, adjectival negation present (adjectival negation) b. Manch eine Kopfverletzung ist zu ungefährlich, um ignoriert zu werden. Some a head injury is too un-dangerous to ignored to get "Some head injuries are too innocuous to be ignored."

Global negation present, adjectival negation absent
Kopfverletzung ist zu gefährlich, um ignoriert zu werden. No head injury is too dangerous to ignored to get "No head injury is too dangerous to be ignored."

Global negation present, adjectival negation present
Kopfverletzung ist zu ungefährlich, um ignoriert zu werden. No head injury is too un-dangerous to ignored to get "No head injury is too innocuous to be ignored." The two types of negation control the "pragmatic" and "semantic" coherence of the sentence: When global negation is present, the compositional meaning demands that one ignore all head injuries, contrary to world knowledge. When adjectival negation is present, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 the scale evoked by the too Y to Z phrase becomes nonsensical, as more trivial head injuries are claimed to be more worthy of attention. The double negation condition, which exhibits both types of incoherence, corresponds to the classical depth charge configuration.
The experimental items were mixed with 64 unrelated fillers. 36 of the fillers contained the negative polarity element jemals, 'ever', along with either a structurally accessible licensor, a structurally inaccessible licensor or no licensor, similar to the design of Drenhaus et al. (2005). We chose these specific items as our fillers in hopes that the ungrammatical conditions may jump out at participants and serve to distract them from the actual purpose of the experiment, and to provide another sentence type whose acceptability rests on the correct use of negation, as otherwise the experimental sentences may have been too noticeable among the fillers.
Procedure The experiment was run on a PC using the Linger software (Rohde, 2003). The stimulus sentences were rotated through the conditions according to a Latin-square procedure. Presentation order was randomized at runtime. Each trial started with the presentation of the sentence in the center of the screen. Participants were instructed to press the space bar once they had finished reading the sentence in order to proceed to a rating task. Here, they indicated on a scale from 1 to 7 whether the sentence had "made clear sense and contained no grammatical errors" (1 = incomprehensible or contains error, 7 = very clear, no errors). We chose a seven-point scale in order to give subjects the opportunity to choose the "middle ground" (4), and also to allow for enough gradation within the "upper" and "lower" parts of the scale. Both the time from the initial sentence presentation to the pressing of the space bar and the time taken to assign the rating were recorded.
Data analysis Bayesian linear mixed-effects models with full variance-covariance matrices for the random effects (Barr et al., 2013;Schielzeth & Forstmeier, 2008) were fitted to whole-sentence reading times and rating times using the brms package (Bürkner, 2017), which provides a front-end for Stan (Stan Development Team, 2018) in R (Core Team, 2018). A shifted lognormal distribution was assumed as the generating distribution for these dependent variables. The lognormal distribution was chosen after applying the Box-Cox procedure (Box & Cox, 1964) using the boxcox function from the MASS package (Venables & Ripley, 2002), which suggested a λ value of zero. Given that the amount of time it takes participants to press the response key is included in each measurement, a shifted distribution provides a more accurate model of the generative process behind the data than an unshifted one (Rouder, 2005). Trials with rating times below 150 ms and above 10 s were removed prior to the analysis. The sensibleness ratings were analyzed by fitting a fully hierarchical cumulative logit model with non-equidistant cutpoints in brms. While many researchers fit metric models to ordinal data such as data collected using Likert scales, such models often yield suboptimal fits to the actual distribution of ratings, and can lead to inflated rates of Type I and Type II errors (Liddell & Kruschke, 2018).
Across models, the factors global negation and adjectival negation were sum-coded, with presence of negation coded as 1 and absence of negation coded as −1, the interaction term being the product of the respective values. Along with the posterior means, we report the 95% credible interval (percentile-based) of each parameter estimate (back-transformed to the original measurement scales) and treat effects as reliable if 95% of the posterior probability are either above or below zero. We also report asˆ the estimated difference between conditions, back-transformed to the original scale, along with its 95% credible interval.
Across all experiments, we use priors that serve to mildly restrict the possible values for each parameter, but nevertheless allow for considerable variation should the data support large differences between conditions. We set Normal(0,5) priors across all fixedeffect parameters for the (shifted) lognormal models and Normal(0,2) priors for the fixedeffect parameters of the cumulative logit model. 7 For the correlation matrices, we used LKJ priors (Lewandowski et al., 2009) with the ν parameter set to 2; with this setting, higher correlation values are treated as being a priori less likely than lower ones, without the prior being overly restrictive.
Four sampling chains with 2000 iterations each were run for each model. The first 1000 samples were discarded as warmup.R values close to 1 were used to monitor for any cases of non-convergence (Gelman & Rubin, 1992). The model function calls, along with the complete fixed-effects output, can be found in Appendix A. The appendices, experimental data and analysis code for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/rb748.

Predictions
The no negation condition (1a) is free of both global and adjectival negation, so that a sensible, compositionally-derived meaning is available. 8 In the adjectival negation condition (1b), the scalar relationship between the adjective and the verb is incongruous (more undangerous (trivial) → less reason to ignore). Anecdotally, sentences in this condition are most easily recognized as being nonsensical. In the global negation condition (1c), world knowledge is contradicted (Ignore all head injuries), but the scalar relationship between the adjective and the verb is congruent (more dangerous → less reason to ignore). Finally, the double negation condition (1d) is the classic depth charge configuration for which meaning inversion should occur: Global negation as well as the negative prefix on the adjective are present and a "negative" lexical verb appears in the complement of the copula. The compositional meaning of the sentence implies that all head injuries should be ignored, which contradicts world knowledge, and the evoked scale is also incongruent. When inversion occurs, sentences of this type are interpreted similarly to sentences in condition (1a) (Some/all head injuries should be treated).
Given that multiple negation is known to be problematic for readers, processing time should increase as more negations are added -assuming that processing is compositional -which would predict the highest reading times in the double negation condition and the shortest reading times in the no negation condition, with the two remaining conditions in between. However, if overloading occurs in the double negation condition, as predicted by the account of Wason & Reich (1979), reading times may instead be similar to or even lower than in the global negation and adjectival negation conditions, as readers are assumed to abort compositional interpretation.
The ambiguity hypothesis predicts that readers will notice that they have encountered an instance of the No X is too Y to Z construction in the double negation condition and abort the computation of any compositional semantics. They would then interpret the construction according to the most plausible intended meaning, which according to Cook & Stevenson (2010) would be indicated by the "negative" polarity of the verb. 9 Assuming that accessing the stored construction is cognitively less effortful than computing the compositional meaning, processing times are not expected to be longer in the double negation condition than in the global and adjectival negation conditions. The predictions of the ambiguity hypothesis are thus in agreement with those of the overloading hypothesis for this dependent measure.
Under the overloading hypothesis, it is possible that the double negation condition will show shorter reading times but longer rating times compared to the global negation and adjectival negation conditions: Failures to compute a compositional interpretation could lead participants to abort reading, press the space bar and then compute a noncompositional interpretation during the rating time. However, we assume that the current task will not allow a neat division into "interpretive" and "post-interpretive" processing (Caplan & Waters, 1999). Rather, we assume that readers will start their deliberation while reading the sentence. If there is processing spillover from the reading process into the rating process, rating times should pattern analogously to reading times.
We purposely avoided incorporating a task that directly probes the final interpretation due to the concern that it might bias participants to do deeper semantic processing than they would do in a more naturalistic setting. Our task shows indirect evidence for meaning reversal if sensibleness ratings are higher in the double negation condition than in the two conditions with one negation each, even though its compositional interpretation combines the problematic elements (world knowledge violation, absurd scale) of the other two. As the no negation condition is also expected to receive high ratings of sensibleness under all accounts being investigated, there should be a crossover interaction between the experimental factors if meaning inversion occurs. Figure 1 shows arithmetic condition means for whole-sentence reading times and rating times; Figure 2 shows the distribution of sensibleness ratings by condition.  revealed by nested contrasts to be driven by higher reading times due to adjectival negation when global negation was absent (ˆ = 1515 ms, CrI: [766 ms, 2301 ms], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 1). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 Sensibleness ratings Global negation had a negative effect on ratings (ˆ = −0.6, CrI: [−1.2, 0.01], Pr(β > 0) = 0.03), as did adjectival negation (ˆ = −1.49, CrI: [−2.26, −0.68], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 0). There was also an interaction (ˆ = 3.08, CrI: [2.12, 3.84], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 1), which nested contrasts revealed to be due to a negative effect of adjectival negation in the absence of global negation (ˆ = −3.95, CrI: [−5.2, −2.72], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 0), but a positive effect in its presence (ˆ = 1.76, CrI: [0.88, 2.62], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 1).

Discussion
In Experiment 1, increasing the number of negations did not lead to a monotonic increase in processing difficulty: Reading times in the double negation (that is, depth charge) condition did not differ from those in the conditions with only global negation or only adjectival negation. We speculate that participants ran up against a capacity or motivation limit even in the latter two conditions and aborted further deliberation. Such a scenario would be compatible with the overloading account. In the absence of global negation, rating times increased in the presence of adjectival negation, which disrupts the internal consistency of the evoked scale. The absence of this effect when global negation is present suggests a partial masking of the semantic incongruity. Finally, the pattern of ratings indicates that meaning inversion occurred: Despite being the semantically and pragmatically most anomalous condition under a compositional interpretation, the double negation condition received the second-highest sensibleness ratings among the four conditions, second only to the no negation condition.
The ambiguity hypothesis offers an entirely different account for the observed pattern: As soon as readers notice that they are faced with an instance of the No X is too Y to Z construction, they may switch from compositional processing to a more idiomatic analysis. 10 That ratings in the double negation condition are not strongly affected by the observed processing difficulty may be explained by assuming that the difficulty is not due to negation overload but rather reflects participants' reasoning about whether the intended meaning is "negative" or "positive". As soon as the (presumably) intended meaning has been identified, the subjective experience would be one of "success" rather than "failure". Under Cook & Stevenson's (2010) version of the ambiguity hypothesis, the point at which the ultimate interpretation is decided would be the "negative" verb.
One potentially problematic aspect of the results for the ambiguity hypothesis is the fact that the double negation condition received lower ratings than the no negation condition, as can be seen in Figure 2. This pattern is unexpected if instances of the negative No X is too Y to Z construction -that is, double negation sentences -are seen as completely sensible and acceptable, and thus no different in their status from no negation sentences. However, proponents of the ambiguity hypothesis could plausibly argue that lower ratings were given in the double negation condition because there is no context that licenses the use of the construction and disambiguates the intended meaning, so that participants may have recognized the construction but sometimes failed to interpret it.
Given that Experiment 1 showed evidence of the depth charge effect occurring in German, and beyond that revealed what could be a "ceiling effect" in processing time due to an inherent capacity limit or strategic time-outs, we turned to eye tracking in order to investigate the on-line processing of depth charge sentences in more detail. For the eye tracking study, we divided the sentence into three regions of interest, which allows inferences as to which part of the sentence is most problematic for readers.

EXPERIMENT 2A
Our second experiment is concerned with two empirical predictions derived from previous work on the depth charge effect. The first prediction is that any measurable effects of noncompositional processing and eventual inversion of meaning should first become visible at the final verb. The final verb has been claimed to be the main source of the depth charge effect both by the original proponents of the overloading hypothesis (Wason & Reich, 1979), as well as by proponents of the ambiguity hypothesis (Cook & Stevenson, 2010). The second prediction concerns the possible influence of readers' working memory capacity on the depth charge effect. If meaning inversion is due to linguistic complexity overloading the reader's working memory capacity, individuals with higher capacity should have partial immunity to it, given that they may occasionally be able to process depth charge sentences compositionally and realize that their meaning is incongruous. Meanwhile, the ambiguity hypothesis does not assume overloading and therefore no influence of working memory capacity on the depth charge effect is predicted.

Method
Participants Sixty-one native speakers of German were recruited from the local student population. Subjects either received credit points or were paid e10 as compensation.

Materials
The same materials as in Experiment 1 were used. For the statistical analysis, three regions of interest were defined: the initial noun phrase, the region from the copula to the comma and the final to-phrase, as indicated by the diamonds below.
(2) Global negation present, adjectival negation present (double negation) a. Keine Kopfverletzung ist zu ungefährlich, um ignoriert zu werden. No head injury is too un-dangerous to ignored to get "No head injury is too innocuous to be ignored." This partitioning allows us to pinpoint the approximate location of the trigger of meaning inversion within the sentence (see predictions below) as well as look at the distribution of reading time across the different regions during possible attempts at reinterpretation.
Procedure Prior to the main experiment, participants completed an operation span test as a measure of working memory capacity, as previously used by Nicenboim et al. (2016) and von der Malsburg & Vasishth (2013), following the recommendations of Conway et al. (2005). 11 As in Nicenboim et al. (2016), single letters as opposed to words were used as recall targets to minimize lexical influences, assuming that working memory is largely a domain-general resource (Kane et al., 2004).
In the main experiment, participants were instructed to read the sentences at their own pace while their eye movements were recorded. We report results for first-pass reading times, regression-path durations (also called go-past times) and total reading times. As in Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate each sentence's sensibleness on a scale from 1-7. A more detailed description of the experimental setup and procedure is given in Appendix B at https://osf.io/rb748.

Data analysis
Factor coding, prior specification, sampling and interpretation were carried out analogously to Experiment 1, but working memory capacity as well as all possible interactions with the experimental factors were added to the model. The predictor reflecting working memory capacity, as measured in partial credit units (PCU; Conway et al., 2005), was centered and scaled prior to being entered into the model, so that the associated parameter estimates reflect the expected effect of increasing working memory capacity by one standard deviation on the PCU scale. PCU scoring assigns partial credit to trials for which one or more items were incorrectly recalled, and does not assign higher weight to trials with higher memory load. A detailed description of the data analysis procedure is given in Appendix B.

Predictions
The overloading hypothesis predicts that low-capacity participants should run up against their limit sooner than high-capacity participants and thus show shorter processing times across the negation conditions. High-capacity participants may show a difference between the double negation condition and the global negation condition: Their capacity-driven or strategic limit may not be exhausted in the double negation condition, thus allowing further compositional processing, so that more processing difficulty is visible in this group in the double negation condition compared to the global negation condition. Low-capacity readers, on the other hand, are not expected to show such a difference, given that their lower limit should may be exhausted in all of the negation conditions. 12 Given the intuition of Wason & Reich (1979), these effects should occur in the final region of the sentence, where the verb ignore appears. Furthermore, if meaning inversion is caused by overloading of working memory, high-capacity participants should show an overall weaker inversion effect, that is, lower ratings in the double negation condition.
The ambiguity hypothesis does not predict any effect of working memory capacity on the interpretation of the depth charge construction. However, as the account of Cook & Stevenson (2010) assumes that the final verb signals the intended semantics of the ambiguous No X is too Y to Z construction, any signs of non-compositional processing should first become visible at the final region of the sentence, where the "negative" verb is encountered. Meanwhile, the account of Fortuin (2014) does not make such a prediction, but instead predicts that non-compositional processing could already become visible at 12 It may seem counterintuitive that high-capacity participants are predicted to show more as opposed to less processing difficulty. However, the prediction follows directly from the assumption that noncompositional processing is faster than compositional processing, and that high-capacity readers are more likely to engage in the latter for a longer time. Such a tendency would also match findings by von der Malsburg & Vasishth (2013) and Nicenboim et al. (2016) suggesting that high-capacity readers experience slowdowns in computationally demanding linguistic environments because they carry out more parsing operations than low-capacity readers. too, that is, in the pre-final region of the sentence. Fortuin (2014, p. 278f.) claims that the combination of global negation with the element too results in a presupposition that there is no excessive degree of trivialness of head injuries, which arguably triggers meaning inversion. Figure 3 shows the means of the three eye tracking measures of interest by region. Figure 4 shows mean rating times by condition. Figure 5 shows the distribution of sensibleness ratings by condition.

Discussion
The main findings of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2A: Comparable amounts of processing difficulty were observed in regression-path durations in the final region of the sentence across the negated conditions, with the no negation condition being easier to process, along with a crossover interaction in ratings signaling the occurrence of the depth charge effect. As opposed to Experiment 1, there was a crossover interaction in rating times as well, such that the no negation and double negation conditions showed shorter mean rating times compared to the adjectival negation and global negation conditions. In the eye tracking measures, we found evidence of interactions in regression-path durations at the final region and in total reading times across the whole sentence. The data indicate a partial suppression of the expected slowdown due to adjectival negation when global negation is present, which suggests that readers omit some steps necessary for the compositional interpretation of the double negation -that is, depth charge -sentences. With regard to the locus of the effect, the critical interaction between negation types first appeared in regression-path durations in region 3, which contained the verb, consistent with the predictions of Wason & Reich (1979) and Cook & Stevenson (2010). We found no evidence that high-capacity participants are more resistant to the depth charge effect. While they spent more time in region 2 on the first pass compared to low-capacity readers when it contained a negated adjective, and showed overall increased regression-path durations in the final region, there was no three-way interaction of the shape predicted by the overloading hypothesis of Wason & Reich (1979) in any measure. If anything, high-capacity readers even showed a tendency toward higher ratings in the double negation condition compared to low-capacity readers, which is not compatible with partial immunity to meaning inversion. However, apart from the statistical results for the three-way interaction in the eye tracking measures being inconclusive, it may be that even high-capacity readers already reach their limit in the single negation conditions, so that there is no visible increase in processing difficulty in the double negation condition. While such an explanation of the null result is possible, it is made somewhat unlikely by the fact that the single negation sentences received lower ratings than the double negation sentences: If capacity overload occurs in all the negation conditions, it would appear to have different effects on the final rating across conditions. It is possible that rather than running out of working memory, readers run up against a motivational limit to compositional interpretation in depth charge sentences. The type of motivation we are thinking of maps closely onto what has been called epistemic motivation in the decision-making literature (e.g. Mayseless & Kruglanski, 1987): Epistemic motivation varies between individuals (and likely between tasks) and determines a person's desire to engage in "deep thinking" by gathering information before reaching a decision (see Amit & Sagiv, 2013 and references therein). In the case of our experiment, the decision in question is which sensibleness rating to assign to the sentence, while the gathering of information maps onto the reading process. When their motivation runs out, participants may turn the contents of their mental buffer into a "bag of words" and combine them in a way that appears plausible according to their world knowledge.
Again, the findings are compatible with the ambiguity hypothesis, which does not predict an effect of working memory capacity on the probability of non-compositional processing, and thus on meaning inversion. The fact that the critical interaction first became visible in the sentence-final region is also consistent with the claim of Cook & Stevenson (2010) that it is the verb that signals the semantics of the ambiguous No X is too Y to Z construction. Meanwhile, the data yield no evidence in favor of the claim of Fortuin (2014) that meaning inversion is already triggered at too.
In order to see whether world knowledge further contributes to meaning inversion, as assumed by Wason & Reich (1979) and Fortuin (2014), we conducted a follow-up experiment. Experiment 2B tests whether there is a direct connection between world knowledge and the strength of the depth charge effect.

EXPERIMENT 2B
Experiment 2B is an ancillary study to Experiment 2A and aims to investigate the influence of participants' world knowledge on the depth charge effect. An influence of world knowledge on meaning inversion had already been hypothesized by Wason & Reich (1979) and was investigated in previous experimental work, with mixed results (Natsopoulos, 1985;O'Connor, 2015). Here, we are specifically interested in whether world knowledge can be shown to affect the on-line processing of depth charge sentences, as would be assumed under the overloading hypothesis as well as under one version of the ambiguity hypothesis (Fortuin, 2014). Under both accounts, depth charge sentences should become easier to process and receive higher ratings if the inverted reading is consistent with world knowledge.
There is an influential stream in language processing research which claims that under certain conditions, comprehenders make use of "fast and frugal" heuristics or a lowlevel "pseudo-grammar" to derive sentence meaning, as opposed to computing syntax and meaning compositionally (e.g. Christianson, 2016;Dwivedi, 2013;Ferreira, 2003;Ferreira et al., 2002;Karimi & Ferreira, 2016;Sanford & Sturt, 2002;Townsend & Bever, 2001). Such "good enough" representations are arguably more likely to be adopted when compositional processing difficulty is high and/or task demands do not require detailed representations of sentence meaning (e.g. Swets et al., 2008). It has also been argued that factors such as the real-world plausibility of events may be recruited during the creation of "good enough" meaning representations. For instance, Ferreira (2003) reports that implausible passive sentences (The dog was bitten by the man) are often misinterpreted, and attributes the finding to the use of a frequency-based heuristic that assigns the agent role to the first noun phrase in the sentence, in addition to the use of general world knowledge. Although the classic overloading account of the depth charge effect would predict that heuristics are used only after compositional processing has failed, some variants of the "good enough" approach assume that heuristics are used first, and that compositional processing is used as a second step to check the derived interpretation. Under this account, when readers reach their limit, they would abort the compositional checking procedure and adopt the heuristic meaning that is already in place.
Meanwhile, the particular version of the ambiguity hypothesis put forward by Cook & Stevenson (2010) explicitly does not consider the pragmatic dimension of depth charge sentences, but limits itself to lexical semantic features of the component words, thus not predicting effects of world knowledge on interpretation. In their corpus study, the model of Cook & Stevenson was reportedly able to correctly identify the intended meaning of 170 depth charge sentences in 88% of cases without using information beyond the lexical semantic level. On the other hand, Fortuin (2014, p. 276) claims that "language users [...] use [...] their general knowledge of their language (and their general background knowledge) to process and make sense of a particular instance [of the depth charge construction]", which would be consistent with world knowledge affecting interpretation.
We are interested not only in an effect of world knowledge on sensibleness ratings, but also on on-line processing, that is, on the eye tracking measures collected in Experiment 2A. Here, we limited our focus to regression-path durations in the sentence-final region, because this was the region where the numerically largest effect occurred.
In order to get an approximate measure of an average person's world knowledge about the content of the stimulus sentences, we had a new set of participants indicate how strongly they agreed with the sensible -that is, negation-free -version of the stimuli from Experiment 2A (Some head injuries are too dangerous to be ignored). We assume that participants only form strong opinions about topics which they subjectively feel they know a lot about. The rationale behind choosing the no negation version was that under meaning reversal, the double negation condition is assigned a meaning that is close to that of the no negation sentence (Treat even seemingly trivial head injuries). Thus, if the double negation sentence is transformed to have approximately the same meaning as the no negation sentence, and if approval of the proposition expressed by the no negation sentence is high, participants should be more convinced that they have interpreted the double negation sentence correctly.

Method
Participants Thirty-five native speakers of German were recruited through social media. They did not receive any compensation for their participation.

Materials
The no negation versions of the 32 sentences from the previous experimentsfor instance, Some head injuries are too dangerous to be ignored -were used as stimuli. There were also 32 fillers, which consisted mainly of political statements and philosophical quotes.

Procedure
The experiment was run on-line on Ibex farm (Drummond, 2018). Presentation order was randomized at runtime. Participants were instructed to read the sentences at their own pace and to indicate on a scale from 1 to 5 whether they agreed with the statement (1 = do not agree at all, 5 = agree completely) and, also on a scale from 1 to 5, how easy they found the sentence to understand (1 = impossible to understand, 5 = easy to understand). We chose a five-point scale for this experiment, as opposed to the seven-point scale used in the previous rating studies, mainly because "ease of understanding" is likely somewhat difficult to evaluate introspectively, and more possible rating categories may have made the task more difficult.

Data analysis
As comprehensibility was not of primary interest in the reanalysis of the data from Experiment 2A, approval was residualized against comprehensibility in hopes of getting a clearer estimate of participants' world knowledge. Residuals were extracted from a linear mixed-effects model fitted to approval with comprehensibility as a fixed effect, as well as random intercepts and random slopes by participant, in lme4 (Bates et al., 2015). The resulting measure was. Mean residual approval was computed for each experimental item, and the scores were centered and scaled before being entered into the analysis as a continuous predictor, such that parameter estimates from the model indicate the effect of increasing approval by one standard deviation.
We reanalyzed regression-path durations in region 3 (to be ignored), rating times and sensibleness ratings from Experiment 2A by fitting maximal models to each measure analogously to the previous experiments. As we were primarily interested in the relationship between the double negation -that is, depth charge -condition and the no negation condition, we dropped the global negation condition from the analysis. The adjectival negation condition, meanwhile, was kept as a control (see predictions below). Two treatment contrasts (one per negation condition) were defined that used the no negation condition as the baseline. All two-way interactions between approval and condition were entered into the model. Working memory was also entered into the model, along with its two-way interactions with condition.
A more detailed description of the data analysis procedure is given in Appendix B.

Predictions
The overloading account plausibly predicts an effect of world knowledge on the adopted non-compositional meaning, given that "good enough" processing has been argued to rely, inter alia, on real-world plausibility (e.g. Dwivedi, 2013;Ferreira, 2003). While Cook & Stevenson's (2010) version of the ambiguity hypothesis explicitly predicts no influence of world knowledge on meaning inversion, as lexical semantic information should be sufficient, the account of Fortuin (2014) does assume that world knowledge is recruited during the processing depth charge sentences. Assuming that world knowledge is recruited, sensibleness ratings in Experiment 2A should be higher in the no negation and double negation conditions for items whose no negation version received higher approval ratings in Experiment 2B, as the inverted meaning of the double negation sentence is similar to that of the no negation sentence. Compared to the no negation condition as the baseline, there should be a larger negative interaction with approval for the adjectival negation sentences compared to the double negation sentences: As the meaning of the double negation sentence is closer to that of the no negation sentence under inversion, approval of the no negation sentence should have more of a positive effect on ratings for the double negation than for the adjectival negation sentence. By the same logic, the effect of approval in the adjectival negation condition should be negative, given that its meaning is nonsensical, especially when compared to a sensible belief about the way that things should normally be.
Under both the overloading account of Wason & Reich (1979) and the ambiguity hypothesis of Fortuin (2014), rating times and regression-path durations in region 3 of Experiment 2A should show a pattern that mirrors the effect on ratings, that is, both measures should show facilitation in the no negation and double negation conditions for items with high approval ratings. If readers compute the inverted interpretation while reading the sentence, this should be easier when it matches their world knowledge. Given Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 this assumption, processing difficulty should increase along with approval in the adjectival negation condition, given the clash between sentence content and world knowledge. Meanwhile, the account of Cook & Stevenson (2010) does not predict any effects of world knowledge on the on-line measures. Figures 6 and 7 show regression-path durations in region 3 (to be ignored), rating times and rating distributions for low-and high-approval items (median split).

Discussion
If world knowledge contributes to the depth charge effect, stronger world knowledge should make the double negation easier to process and increase the strength of the depth charge effect. This prediction was partly borne out in the data, consistent with both the overloading hypothesis and the ambiguity hypothesis as proposed by Fortuin (2014). The results suggest that human readers do use pragmatic information to resolve the meaning of depth charge sentences, calling into question the conclusion of Cook & Stevenson (2010) that lexical information from the verb is sufficient. Ratings of sensibleness showed an effect of approval ratings from Experiment 2B on sensibleness ratings from Experiment 2A, such that higher sensibleness ratings were given in the double negation condition for highapproval items, just like in the baseline no negation condition. There was also evidence that the adjectival negation condition received lower ratings than the baseline for high-approval items.
High-approval items also showed shorter regression paths from the region containing the lexical verb, suggesting that world knowledge reduced processing difficulty, but there was no interaction with condition. The absence of such an interaction is somewhat unexpected, given that the semantics of the adjectival negation condition show a transparent mismatch with the semantics of the no negation condition, which our measure of world knowledge was based on. There is, however, weak evidence for both interaction terms for the nonbaseline conditions to be positive. There is thus evidence that world knowledge does play a role in determining the final interpretation of depth charge sentences, as had been hypothesized in earlier work (Fortuin, 2014;Kizach et al., 2015;Natsopoulos, 1985;O'Connor, 2015;Wason & Reich, 1979).

EXPERIMENT 3
Our next experiment investigates the central point of disagreement between the overloading hypothesis and the ambiguity hypothesis, the question of whether the inverted interpretation of depth charge sentences is the result of one or multiple processing errors or a feature of grammar. The overloading hypothesis predicts that meaning inversion should occur in other environments that are of comparable linguistic complexity to the original depth charge construction, given that participants' processing capacity should be exceeded in the same way. On the other hand, the ambiguity hypothesis would not necessarily predict the effect to generalize to other linguistic environments, unless additional assumptions are made regarding mutual similarity of constructions in the grammar.
If the depth charge effect is intimately tied to the hypothesized No X is too Y to Z construction that is stored as a grammatical template -which is one interpretation of the ambiguity hypothesis endorsed by Cook & Stevenson (2010) and Fortuin (2014) -one would not necessarily assume comparable effects in sentences that are closely matched to the construction in terms of compositional semantics. Fortuin notes that there are such constructions, which may or may not license "negative" readings (No sport is too marginal as to be ignored, p. 282), but does not offer a formal account of the relationships between constructions, nor of the effects that such relationships have on online processing. Indeed, Fortuin states that "one could speak about a typology or perhaps network of constructions, as long as one keeps in mind that the different constructions exist independently of one another, perhaps in different linguistic systems, even though general (i.e. non language dependent) semantic-pragmatic and perhaps cognitive factors may explain their occurrence" (p. 286). Given this qualification, it remains an open question under the ambiguity hypothesis whether the depth charge effect should be thought of as a more general phenomenon. The overloading account, on the other hand, naturally predicts that the effect should generalize to other constructions that share (some of) the problematic aspects of classic depth charge sentences.
In order to investigate how potential depth charge configurations behave in different linguistic constructions, and thus to find out whether the effect generalizes beyond the classic No X is too Y to Z schema, we identified two alternative ways of expressing the same meaning. The first alternative construction keeps the particle zu, 'too', but substitutes the to-infinitive for a finite clause introduced by als dass, 'as that'. Apart from being a different type of potentially conventionalized form-meaning pair, this particular construction contains neither the final zu-infinitive nor the passive construction in the infinitival clause, which may lighten the overall processing load, given that passives are known to be troublesome (Ferreira, 2003). The second construction replaces the particle zu, 'too' with so, 'so', thereby eliminating the implicit negation carried by the former.

Method
Participants Sixty native speakers of German from the local student population participated in the experiment. They were paid either e7 or received credit points as compensation.

Materials
The experiment employed a 2 × 3 design with the factors negation (adjectival negation versus double negation) and construction (too . . . to versus too . . . as that versus so . . . that). An example item in all six conditions is shown in (3). In order to derive the same meaning as in the original sentence, an overt negation appears in the final clause of the so . . . that construction. Both alternative constructions were compared against the zu . . . um construction as a baseline. To assure balanced presentation of the six conditions, only thirty out of the original 32 items were used. The modal verbs appearing in the too . . . as that and so . . . that constructions varied between items, and sometimes between conditions of the same item as well. We used either k "onnte, 'could', or sollte, 'should', according to our own judgment of which of the two sounded more acceptable in a given context.

Global negation present, adjectival negation present (double negation) d. Keine
Kopfverletzung ist zu ungefährlich, No head injury is too un-dangerous "No head injury is too innocuous . . . " TOO . . . TO construction um ignoriert zu werden. to ignored to get " . . . to be ignored." TOO . . . AS THAT construction als dass man sie ignorieren könnte. as that one it ignore could " . . . that one could ignore it (/them)." SO . . . THAT construction Global negation absent, adjectival negation present (adjectival negation) b'. Manch eine Kopfverletzung ist so ungefährlich, Some a head injury is so un-dangerous "Some head injuries are so innocuous . . . "

Global negation present, adjectival negation present (double negation) d'. Keine
Kopfverletzung ist so ungefährlich, No head injury is so un-dangerous "No head injury is so innocuous . . . " dass sie nicht ignoriert werden sollte. that it not ignored get should " . . . that it (/they) should not be ignored".

Procedure
The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1.

Data analysis
Data analysis was carried out analogously to Experiment 1. For all models, the factor negation was sum-coded with the double negation condition being coded as 1 and the adjectival negation condition being coded as −1. For the factor construction, a treatment contrast with the um . . . zu construction as the baseline was coded.

Predictions
Under the overloading hypothesis, given that the too . . . as that construction features an active verb, an overt subject and an overt modal verb, it should possibly cause fewer inversions than the too . . . to construction, as the reader needs to make fewer inferences (Should/could/must be ignored by whom?) and processing difficulty should thus be reduced. The so . . . that construction keeps the passive, but removes the implicit negation carried by too. As this negation is one out of a total of three that appear prior to inversion being triggered, and as implicit negation may be even more difficult to process than overt negation, the so . . . that construction may show the depth charge effect in a weakened form or not at all. Generally, if the presence of too many negations (and possibly other processing factors) makes subjects resort to "good enough" processing strategies, meaning inversion should occur across the entire spectrum of constructions.
A strong version of the ambiguity hypothesis would predict that only the too . . . to construction should show an illusion, given that it is represented lexically as a holistic unit with two pre-specified meanings. The account of Cook & Stevenson (2010) makes no predictions as to whether meaning inversion generalizes to other constructions. With nothing else said, it may be assumed that the effect should not generalize. On the other hand, Fortuin (2014, p. 279) discusses systematic commonalities and differences between constructions that would predict the depth charge effect to occur in the too . . . as that construction but not in the so . . . that construction. According to Fortuin's analysis, both too . . . to and too . . . as that share the expressed semantics of an "excessive" degree introduced by too, compared to constructions with so that arguably do not express an excessive degree. Specifically, Fortuin (2014, p. 281) claims that the negative too construction "easily suggests [...] an excessive degree [on a scale] such that some situation is blocked, due to which the situation cannot be realized", which creates the need to express an additional, compositionally unlicensed negation. Furthermore, "[t]his inherent modality is absent in the resultative degree construction [with so . . . that]" (ibid.), hence no additional negation needs to be expressed. The prediction of Fortuin's account is thus that the double negation condition should receive higher ratings and be easier to process than the adjectival negation condition for the too . . . to and the too . . . as that construction, but not for the so . . . that construction, which should be processed compositionally and recognized as not being sensible in both conditions.

Results
Whole-sentence reading times and rating times by construction and condition are shown in Figure 8. Figure 9 shows the distribution of sensibleness ratings across constructions and conditions.

Rating times No effects in evidence.
Sensibleness ratings Sensibleness ratings were higher in the double negation compared to the adjectival negation condition in the baseline too . . . to construction (ˆ = 3.12, CrI:

Discussion
Whole-sentence reading times showed no difference regarding the effect of double negation between the baseline too . . . to and the similar too . . . as that construction, but did show a difference between the too . . . to and the so . . . that construction, such that the latter showed increased reading times in the double negation condition while the former did not. Ratings of sensibleness also did not show a difference in the effect of double negation between the too . . . to and the too . . . as that construction, both of which exhibited an inversion effect of equal strength. The so . . . that construction on the other hand showed a significantly smaller but nevertheless non-zero increase in sensibleness ratings in the double negation condition. Taken together, the results suggest that the depth charge effect is not limited to the construction originally investigated by Wason & Reich (1979) and used in later empirical studies (Kizach et al., 2015;Natsopoulos, 1985;O'Connor, 2015). Furthermore, the observed pattern suggests that the too . . . to and the too . . . as that construction are essentially processed in the same way while the so . . . that construction shows a marked difference both with regard to visible processing difficulty as well as to the strength of the effect on sensibleness ratings.
Our result suggests that a strong version of the ambiguity hypothesis where No X is too Y to Z is the only construction that shows the depth charge effect is not tenable. Nevertheless, it is possible that the depth charge effect generalizes due to similarities between the different stored constructions. Fortuin's (2014) account predicts that constructions featuring too should show inversion while constructions with so should not. The prediction can be argued to have been borne out in our study, given that the additional negation only created processing difficulty in the so . . . that construction. However, Fortuin's account does not explain why higher sensibleness ratings were given in the double negation condition compared to the adjectival negation condition for this construction. To our minds, this result may either indicate a weak but nevertheless non-zero inversion effect or simply confusion on part of the participants. The latter explanation strikes us as less convincing because confusion should result in lower rather than higher ratings, unless participants gravitate towards the middle of the rating scale in such situations. The overloading account, meanwhile, would attribute the increase in processing difficulty in the so . . . that construction to the presence of an explicit negation, which is less likely to surreptitiously license the negative verb and cause meaning inversion.
All in all, the results of our experiments so far do not decisively favor either the overloading or the ambiguity-based account. However, as we believe the overloading account to be more in line with the broader empirical literature (see general discussion), we will propose a novel approach to the genesis of the depth charge effect that assumes a specific type of composition failure. In the next section, we sketch an account of how heuristic processing of multiple negations, presumably triggered by the implicit negation of too, may lead to the depth charge effect. Crucially, our proposed account assumes that the depth charge effect is triggered before the final verb. In order to test this prediction, we conduct a sentence completion study in which the stimulus sentences are truncated before the verb, similarly to O'Connor (2015; 2017).

EXPERIMENT 4
The findings of Experiment 2A appear to allow for the conclusion that the lexical verb is the source of the depth charge effect, consistent with the version of the ambiguity hypothesis proposed by Cook & Stevenson (2010) and the intuition of Wason & Reich (1979). However, the evidence from Experiment 2A is less conclusive than it appears at first glance, given that there may be partial processing spillover from previous regions: Linguistic processes triggered by an input word may become visible in on-line measures after readers have already advanced to the next word or even beyond, as outstanding integration steps may be carried over. At the end of the sentence, the spillover buffer is cleared in a "wrap-up" process (Just & Carpenter, 1980;Rayner et al., 2000), so that effects whose origins could potentially lie anywhere in the sentence will become visible at the final region. Given the high number of negations in the stimulus sentences, participants may have been forced to delay certain aspects of the compositional computation to the end of the sentence. Any leftover processing may then cause regressions to earlier regions for verification or reanalysis purposes, though currently there exists no precise theory as to how these processes operate (von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2011, 2013.
Given that the evidence so far is inconclusive, further investigations are in order. The accounts of Cook & Stevenson (2010) and Wason & Reich (1979) predict that the depth charge effect should disappear when the lexical verb is removed from the sentence. This can be achieved by presenting participants with only the part of the sentence that leads up to the verb, and having them choose an appropriate continuation by themselves. If participants provide continuations that match a non-compositional as opposed to a compositional interpretation of the preamble, this would cast severe doubt on the assumption that the depth charge effect is triggered by the lexical verb. Recall that the account of Fortuin (2014) makes the prediction that meaning inversion should occur before the lexical verb, namely when the presupposition of "not acting" is triggered at too, setting it apart from the other proposed accounts. Wason & Reich (1979, p. 592) anecdotally report that if the verb ignored is substituted with noticed in the original example, the resulting sentence No head injury is too trivial to be noticed is often claimed to be nonsensical, even though it is compositionally sensible. A possible implication is that readers expect the verb ignore -or something semantically similar to it -to appear at the end of the sentence, as opposed to a verb that would be sensible under a compositional reading. This, along with the previous results from O 'Connor (2015;, would suggest that semantic inversion already occurs before the final verb appears. It is not necessary to subscribe to the ambiguity account to derive the prediction that compositional processing is suspended prior to the appearance of the lexical verb. As a variant of the overloading approach of Wason & Reich (1979), one can assume that semantic composition fails before the lexical verb is encountered. Taking inspiration from the "good enough" approach to language processing, we suggest two plausible candidate heuristics that readers may apply. We assume that the processing of depth charge sentences is compositional at first, but that readers reach a motivation limit at some point where they consider a heuristic analysis to be a "good enough" approximation of the sentence meaning.
The first heuristic is negation cancellation: It assumes that adding another negation to a negated sentence always nullifies the effect of both negations.
Negation cancellation: Assume that two negations in a clause will cancel each other out.

(duplex negatio affirmat)
This is not entirely unreasonable as a rule of thumb. For instance, the sentence It's not like you didn't cheat on me means You cheated on me, given that written American and Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 British English, like German, do not exhibit negative concord. 13 However, in depth charge sentences, the configuration is such that the duplex negatio affirmat rule does not hold. The copula clause assigns a property to the subject, and negation scoping over the copula does not change the content of the property. Asserting that no head injury has the property of being too trivial to be ignored should thus leave intact the absurd meaning of the property too trivial to be ignored. The intuition behind the heuristic is that readers are generalizing a rule that holds in some double negation contexts to a context in which it should not be applied: If global and adjectival negation are assumed to cancel out, the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored is transformed into A least one head injury is too dangerous to be ignored, which appears sensible.
Yet another possibility is that readers do not reason about how to combine the negations at all when faced with (seemingly) insurmountable processing difficulty; they just know from experience that it is usually the lexical verb of the sentence that negation is applied to.
Negate the verb: When in doubt, negate the lexical verb.
Note that the lexical verb is, in fact, not negated in depth charge sentences: Even though there is global negation, compositionally, the sentence does state that head injuries should be ignored, just like the sentence No missile is too small to be banned is usually correctly interpreted to mean that all missiles should be banned (Wason & Reich, 1979). The intuition behind negate the verb is that it may not be immediately obvious under processing pressure that the global negation does not negate the lexical verb, because too is not necessarily registered as introducing implicit negation. The negation on the verb can be seen as an "echo" of the global negation that is generated because the processor has lost track of how many negations it has encountered, presumably when too is read. The difference in the missile sentence is that the correct meaning is compatible with most people's views about the world and the scale is internally consistent (smaller missile → less reason to ban), so the comprehension system is never under enough pressure to have to resort to heuristics. In a depth charge configuration, then, semantic and pragmatic factors possibly conspire and derail compositional interpretation, so the processor has to heuristically infer that the sentence should, minimally, be taken to mean that something should not be ignored.
Having described two possible mechanisms by which meaning inversion may be triggered, both of which may apply before encountering the lexical verb, we now turn to our sentence completion study.

Method
Participants Sixty native speakers of German from the local student population participated in the experiment. They were either paid e7 or received credit points as compensation.

Materials
The preambles used to elicit the sentence completions consisted of sentences from the double and adjectival negation conditions of the previous experiments that were pruned after um, 'too'. We chose the adjectival negation condition as our control condition because it received the lowest ratings in the previous experiments, indicating that no meaning inversion is to be expected.

Global negation present, adjectival negation present
Kopfverletzung ist zu ungefährlich, um . . . No head injury is too un-dangerous to "No head injury is too innocuous to . . . " The rationale behind the design is that if inversion occurs in (4d), participants should volunteer completions like be ignored, whereas under a compositional reading of the preamble completions like . . . be noticed or . . . be treated should be given. For (4b), the latter two completions are also sensible under a compositional reading, and inversion is not expected to occur.
We opted for a sentence completion as opposed to a forced-choice design -in which one would have forced participants to choose either . . . be ignored or . . . to be treated as the continuation -because we did not want to bias subjects by explicitly offering written alternatives, which may trigger readings that would not otherwise be available. Given that participants were free to produce any kind of continuation, we had coders who were blind to experimental manipulation group the completions into binary categories (inversion versus no inversion, see below).

Procedure
Participants were asked to complete the sentences in the way they found most plausible. Both the time taken to read the preamble and the time taken to finish typing in the response were recorded.
We created two coding schemes that allowed grouping the completions into binary categories ('inversion'/'no inversion'): Scheme A had coders decide whether completions signaled that the subject of the sentence was of low importance or interest (head injury -ignore), under the assumption that potential low importance is a hallmark of meaning inversion (see Appendix B for discussion). 14 Scheme B tested whether the completion fit with a sensible, negation-free sentence (This head injury is too trivial to be ignored), based on the observation that the inverted meaning is "normalized" to fit into a sensible template. The coding schemes are described in detail in Appendix B.
Data analysis For both coding schemes, data points for which a coder could not decide on a category were removed from the respective data set. Data for one item were completely removed from further analysis as an incomplete preamble had been presented by mistake. For the remaining items, inter-coder agreement was higher for coding scheme A (Fleiss' κ = 0.77, "substantial agreement") 15 than for coding scheme B (Fleiss' κ = 0.49, "moderate agreement"). Completion types according to the different coding schemes were correlated at the observation level (r = 0.52, 95% confidence interval: [0.51, 0.53]).
The coded completions (inversion/no inversion) were analyzed using hierarchical logistic regression in brms with random intercepts and slopes for items, subjects and coders, as well as random intercepts for all coder-item and coder-subject pairs, given that each coder encountered the same item as well as responses from the same subject more than once. For the fixed effect of condition, the double negation condition was coded as 1 and the adjectival negation condition as −1. Reading times for the preamble as well as the time taken to produce the completion were analyzed analogously to previous experiments. For completion times, the length of the produced completion in characters was entered into the analysis as a centered and scaled predictor. Further details of the statistical analysis are described in Appendix B.

Predictions
The version of the ambiguity hypothesis proposed by Cook & Stevenson (2010) assumes that the lexical verb decides the ultimate meaning of the No X is too Y to Z construction. Given that subjects do not have access to the verb in the present design, they should thus be unsure as to which is the intended meaning, and plausibly resort to guessing, or default to the same meaning in both conditions. If readers experience confusion and resort to guessing, sometimes selecting the compositional meaning and sometimes the inverted meaning, we expect about 50% answers from both categories. Moreover, increased confusion in the double negation condition should lead to increased reading and/or completion times if subjects are having trouble deciding which continuation best fits the preamble. Wason & Reich (1979) hypothesized that encountering the lexical verb triggers memory overload and non-compositional interpretation, so that no depth charge effect is predicted in the absence of the verb and interpretation may always proceed compositionally.
Meanwhile, if the origin of the depth charge effect lies before the verb, as argued by Fortuin (2014), more inversion-signaling continuations are expected in the double negation condition compared to the adjectival negation condition. The account of Fortuin (2014) claims that a preamble such as No head injury is too trivial . . . "presupposes" the use of a "negative" verb (p. 278). The gist of the proposal is that "negativity" in the preamble leads the reader to assume that a "negative" interpretation is intended, which may include a presupposition to the effect of "not acting" (p. 264).
Alternatively, under our proposed version of the overloading account, it is possible that doubly negated preambles lead to heuristic processing strategies such as the negation cancellation and negate the verb being used to predict a verb that matches the inverted meaning. If heuristic interpretation strategies are reliably applied, or if the "negative" preamble reliably allows for an intended "negative" meaning of the stored construction to be inferred, we expect to see a proportion of inversion-signaling continuations above 50% in the double negation condition. Reading and sentence completion times Neither reading nor sentence completion times showed any evidence of a difference between the conditions. Longer completions did, however, take longer to produce (ˆ = 2430 ms, CrI: [2357 ms, 2506 ms], Pr(β > 0) ≈ 1).

Discussion
The findings suggest that the depth charge effect is not mainly caused by the sentence-final verb, but that the anomalous verb is selected because the preamble reliably "keys" the noncompositional meaning in double negation sentences (Fortuin, 2014;see also O'Connor, 2015). This conclusion does not change depending on whether an abstract semantic dimension of subjective importance or the fit with a matched negation-free sentence is used as the basis for coding. Detailed results for the two coding schemes, as well as a discussion of potentially problematic data points, can be found in Appendix B.
The results are compatible with the particle too rather than the lexical verb being the main culprit behind the depth charge effect, as assumed by Fortuin (2014). Inversionsignaling continuations were produced more often than would be expected if readers were choosing a completion by chance, suggesting that non-compositional processing Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 prior to encountering the lexical verb is the norm in depth charge sentences, and that the inverted meaning is reliably computed. As in previous experiments, there was no indication that the double negation condition was more difficult to process than the adjectival negation condition, suggesting that some aspect of the compositional analysis is left out. This can be interpreted either as evidence that readers are accessing the "negative" version of the No X is too Y to Z construction, as predicted by Fortuin's (2014) version of the ambiguity hypothesis, or that they are switching to heuristic processingusing negation cancellation or negate the verb -and thus predicting the compositionally unlicensed verb.

GENERAL DISCUSSION
In a series of five experiments on German, we have shed new light onto the classic meaning inversion effect in depth charge sentences, such as No head injury is too trivial to be ignored. Using a design which varied the presence versus absence of negation at the beginning of the sentence and at the adjective within the copula phrase, Experiments 1 and 2A showed that only when both negations were present, the depth charge effect became visible in ratings of sensibleness. Both experiments also yielded evidence that in the presence of global negation, adjectival negation, despite causing the sentence to be internally inconsistent, does not cause an increase in processing difficulty, as indicated by both whole-sentence reading times and eye tracking measures across the sentence. Both findings are, in principle, compatible both with the assumption of composition failure (Kizach et al., 2015;Wason & Reich, 1979) and with the ambiguity hypothesis (Cook & Stevenson, 2010;Fortuin, 2014). However, as Experiment 2A yielded no reliable evidence that the depth charge effect is influenced by working memory capacity, the data do not provide evidence for the overloading account of Wason & Reich (1979) as a specific instance of the overloading hypothesis. This is not to say that we have found evidence against the overloading account; the results are simply inconclusive. Nevertheless, we have suggested that as opposed to a limit of working memory capacity, readers may run into a limit of motivation to further process the sentence, at which point they switch to a "good enough" interpretation strategy.
Based on the assumption of Fortuin (2014) and Cook & Stevenson (2010) that No X is too Y to be Z is interpreted as a holistic unit, Experiment 3 tested whether the depth charge effect is also detectable in two related constructions in German. We found that meaning inversion does indeed occur in these constructions, but that it appears to be strongly related to the appearance of the particle too, which introduces an implicit negation: When too was absent, the depth charge effect still appeared, but was of a much smaller magnitude compared to when it was present. While the results are compatible with the ambiguity hypothesis under the assumption that different constructions may exhibit the same behavior, they provide evidence against an account in which the No X is too Y to be Z construction is the only configuration in which the depth charge effect occurs.
We also investigated the point of origin of the depth charge effect within the sentence. Experiment 4 showed that meaning inversion occurs prior to the appearance of the lexical verb using sentence completions, as had been previously observed by O'Connor (2015;. This suggests that both Wason & Reich (1979)'s speculation that the compositional derivation is derailed by the verb ignore as well as the assumption by Cook & Stevenson (2010) that the verb is the key to the intended meaning of the construction are incorrect. 16 Under the overloading account, one needs to assume that compositional processing fails at an earlier point in the sentence and that non-compositional processes are then used to predict the incorrect verb. We have argued that our proposed heuristics negation cancellation and negate the verb are plausible candidates for mechanisms that ultimately yield the inverted reading when readers exceed their motivation limit. Alternatively, the proposal by Fortuin (2014) that the use of two negative elements (no and too) creates and then cancels a presupposition of "not acting" predicts the licensing of a "negative" verb in depth charge contexts. Finally, our result matches Wason & Reich's (1979) observation that the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be noticed is sometimes judged not to be sensible despite having a sensible compositional meaning: Readers apparently expect a continuation with the approximate semantics of ignored and are surprised when they encounter a continuation that has the opposite meaning.
We suggest that readers may make use of the negation cancellation and negate the verb heuristics as a last resort when faced with a sentence that is otherwise impossible to parse. When negation cancellation is applied to the sentence No head injury is too trivial to be ignored, global and adjectival negation nullify each other, which leaves At least one (≈ some) head injury is too dangerous to ignore, the meaning of the sensible no negation sentence. Subjects applying negation cancellation would be wrongly using the "conversion method", where a doubly negated sentence is converted into its non-negated counterpart in order to be more easily interpretable (e.g. Clark, 1976). Indeed, we have anecdotal evidence from two subjects who reported using this method to interpret depth charge sentences. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence reported by Wason (1961) suggests that subjects may use the conversion method even in single-negation sentences.
Note that duplex negatio affirmat generally does not apply in multiclausal sentences such as Because he didn't want to insult her, he did not make a comment. The fact that the rule cannot be lawfully applied in depth charge sentence thus fits well with Schwarzschild's (2008) semantic analysis of too, which is argued to contain an implicit embedded clause headed by because (X is too young to smoke → X should not smoke because X is too young). The double-negation rule does also not apply to cases of double negative quantification, as in None of the girls met none of the boys. Furthermore, as noted by Horn (2001) and pointed out by an anonymous reviewer, two negations routinely do not cancel out if one of them is expressed by a bound morpheme (e.g. The king is not unkind to his enemies), as in classic depth charge sentences. Given these observations, it would be highly dubious to claim that negation cancellation is widely applied as a heuristic during normal sentence processing, as the number of exceptions would be too high.
Negation cancellation also fails to account for depth charge effects in sentences without adjectival negation, such as No challenge is too big to stop us from saving our children from polio (Fortuin, 2014). Fortuin (p. 253) gives a list of such examples and argues that they show the "four negations" generalization made by Wason & Reich (1979) to be incorrect. However, as we have noted before, the results of Kizach et al. (2015) show that adjectival negation does contribute significantly to the depth charge effect, even though it is not a necessary prerequisite. Thus, while negation cancellation cannot be the sole explanation for the depth charge effect, it nevertheless potentially accounts for a large subset of meaning inversions.
A formalization of the negation cancellation and negate the verb heuristics, along with a third possibility, namely the conversion of too into the semantic equivalent of enough, is given in Appendix C at https://osf.io/rb748.

The depth charge illusion in the broader empirical context
The notion of a strategic "time-out" that stops compositional processing after a fixed period of time is compatible with the idea of partially "good enough" or "shallow" linguistic processing (e.g. Christianson, 2016;Ferreira et al., 2002;Karimi & Ferreira, 2016;Sanford & Sturt, 2002), and with the idea of a "stop rule" that terminates processing when the current output is deemed satisfactory (e.g. Simon, 1972). The "good enough" approach to sentence comprehension maintains that readers do not necessarily construct a fully specified representation of the input, but are in pursuit of an interpretation that is deemed sufficient given current task demands (e.g. Swets et al., 2008). It is by no means clear whether such "shallow" representations are usually the result of strategies that are consciously applied by participants or whether resource limitations force subjects to adopt incomplete representations. For instance, von der Malsburg & Vasishth (2013) found evidence suggesting that participants with low working memory capacity leave syntactic attachments underspecified more often. If low-capacity participants are forced into underspecification due to their processing system's inherent limitations, "good enough" is something of a misnomer: It implies a conscious decision to abort processing when one can be reasonably sure that the task at hand can be solved given the current representation. On the other hand, if the system simply runs out of resources at some point, there is no reasonable expectation that the current output structure will be sufficient.
The ambiguity hypothesis avoids this question by assuming that readers are mainly trying to infer the communicative (or rhetorical) intention behind the utterance to decide whether a "positive" or a "negative" reading should be derived. Interestingly, when reading depth charge sentences, one neither gets the subjective impression of having been exposed to a rhetorical device nor of having failed to grasp the correct meaning due to complexity overload. Under the overloading account, "failure" apparently does not entail "awareness of failure", unlike in particularly difficult garden-path sentences (The horse raced past the barn fell; see also O'Connor, 2015, p. 226/7).
It is remarkable that our depth charge stimuli showed relatively high ratings across studies despite the amount of processing difficulty they cause in comparison to negationfree sentences. Normally, one would assume acceptability to suffer more noticeably than it did in the present study when there is processing difficulty (e.g. Fanselow & Frisch, 2006;Hofmeister et al., 2013;Warren & Gibson, 2002). We speculate that our instructions prompted subjects to not take into account how easy or difficult the sentences were to process when assigning their ratings, but focus on the end result of their effort. Recall that the instructions were to indicate whether the sentences "made clear sense and contained no grammatical mistakes". As depth charge sentences appear to make sense at first glance, they would probably not arouse any suspicion in a connected discourse, where the prior expectation that utterances are sensible would likely cause an immediate switch to noncompositional processing. In such a setting, the subjective impression of fluent processing would likely also preempt any inclination to second-guess the adopted interpretation. However, in the context of an explicit judgment task, checking for errors and meaning incongruity likely causes processing to be experienced as more disfluent, which may in turn lead to more analytic processing of the stimulus (Alter et al., 2007).
With regard to the apparent mismatch between the assumption of processing failure and perceived acceptability, depth charge patterns with a number of other phenomena where normal processing fails or is suspended but no conscious failure is registered, and even processing facilitation may be observed: • Agreement attraction: Sentences that are ungrammatical due to number mismatch between subject and verb sometimes appear grammatical, and are processed faster, when a noun phrase with a matching number feature appears in a structurally inaccessible position (*The key to the cabinets are on the table; e.g. Dillon et al., 2013;Jäger et al., 2017;Kimball & Aissen, 1971;Lago et al., 2015;Wagers et al., 2009). • Intrusive NPI licensing: Similarly to agreement attraction, the negative polarity item ever can sometimes be erroneously licensed by a negative element in a nonc-commanding position, which results in some processing disruption and positive grammaticality judgments (*A pirate who had no beard was ever thrifty; Drenhaus et al., 2005;Parker & Phillips, 2016;Vasishth et al., 2008;Xiang et al., 2013). • Structural forgetting: Sentences containing complex center embeddings are read faster in English when a required verb is missing (*The apartment that the maid who the service had sent over was well decorated; Frank et al., 2016;Gibson & Thomas, 1999;Vasishth et al., 2010). • Underspecification: In the presence of syntactic ambiguity, processing time is shorter if the reader does not commit to an analysis Nicenboim et al., 2016;Swets et al., 2008;von der Malsburg & Vasishth, 2013). • Comparative illusions: Participants often judge sentences such as More people have been to Russia than I have as well-formed even though they are not (O'Connor, 2015;Wellwood et al., 2018).
Looking at the depth charge effect in this context, the claim made by the ambiguity hypothesis that the compositionally incorrect reading is licensed by the grammar becomes less convincing: The existence of systematic patterns of positive acceptability judgments in the absence of a word-by-word compositional derivation does not necessarily constitute evidence that these judgments are licensed by grammar.

A possible synthesis of the accounts, and the role of world knowledge
In light of the results of Experiment 3, where the depth charge effect was observed for different constructions, one could argue that the overloading account is the more parsimonious approach to explaining the depth charge effect, as it naturally predicts that the effect should generalize. However, setting up the overloading account and the ambiguity account as mutually exclusive may be misguided. The model of Kuperberg (2007) assumes that there are two linguistic processing streams that work in parallel during comprehension: A semantic stream and a combinatorial syntactic stream. The semantic stream is sensitive to meaning relationships between content words while the combinatorial stream keeps track of the syntactic structure of the input. It is entirely plausible that the intuition behind the ambiguity hypothesis partly maps onto the workings of the semantic processing stream, which is sensitive to lexical meaning, associative Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 relationships between words and world knowledge. The claim of Fortuin (2014) that the "negative" reading of depth charge sentences serves a rhetorical function could potentially be subsumed under this aspect of processing. Kuperberg assumes that the syntacticcombinatorial stream usually overrules the semantic stream in case of a mismatch between the respective representations of sentence meaning. However, if compositional processing is aborted due to complexity overload or strategic suspension, the output of the semantic stream may determine sentence interpretation. 17 Such a combined account would possibly obviate the need for negation-related processing heuristics such as the ones we have proposed.
Recall that Experiment 2B yielded evidence that world knowledge was recruited even in sentences with no overt negations. The predicted interaction between world knowledge and the number of negations appeared only in sensibleness ratings, but not in the online measures, which may suggest that the depth charge effect is partly due to world knowledge affecting "post-interpretive" processing (Caplan & Waters, 1999). This supports the proposal of Kuperberg (2007, p. 37) that "the meanings [of the words] are first combined through pragmatic or inferential heuristic mechanisms into tentative propositions (a 'quick and dirty' means of deriving the gist of a proposition) and that it is the plausibility of this proposition as a whole that is then evaluated against real-world knowledge [...]". Our results suggest that world knowledge serves both as a guide during on-line processing and as the basis for a final check of the derived semantics, where it contributes to the depth charge effect. 18 World knowledge may affect the "mental model" that readers construct of the sentence meaning during processing (e.g. Glenberg et al., 1987;Kaup et al., 2006Kaup et al., , 2007. Mental models are simulations that rely on experience, so it is not unlikely that they would resist conforming to the nonsensical input, and that readers may use a "pragmatically normalized" (Fillenbaum, 1974;Garrod & Sanford, 1995) representation of the proposition as a basis (such as the treatment of a minor head injury). Speculatively, readers may first construct a basic "setting" including the concepts that are mentioned in the sentence, computing their relations only as a second step during off-line processing. 19

The role of incrementality and prediction
A further point that can be made in support of the overloading account is that it is, in principle, possible to make readers aware of the incorrectness of the inverted reading. One strategy is to instruct readers to not start reading the depth charge sentence from 17 See Townsend & Bever (2001) and Ferreira (2003) for related proposals. 18 O'Connor (2015) found no evidence for an effect of world knowledge, but it is possible that this is a false negative result, or that the experimental design employed was not optimal for detecting an effect. The latter may be partly because all was taken to be the semantic opposite of no, whereas we have argued that some is better suited. In addition, O'Connor (2015) asked participants to rate "the extent to which [the sentence] describes a realistic scenario" (p. 191), which may lead to quite different inferences compared to our approval ratings in Experiment 2B, given that depth charge sentences do not describe concrete scenarios but rather express an opinion (Head injuries should be treated). 19 This idea is similar to the account proposed by Fischler et al. (1983), in which negated sentences such as A robin is not a truck are first evaluated without the negation before the actual proposition is computed (but see Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008 for a contrasting view).
the beginning, but to only look at the phrase too trivial to be ignored first before trying to combine it with the global negation, which anecdotally often results in them noticing the error. The success of this strategy highlights the role of incrementality in the genesis of the depth charge effect: Only when global negation is processed before encountering the too phrase does meaning inversion become irreversible. 20 One can also present minimal pairs of too-and enough-sentences or ignore-and treat-sentences side-by-side and point out that they cannot (or at least should not) mean the same thing. Or one can paraphrase the sentence by putting all content except the global negation into a subordinate clause, as in It is not the case that a head injury can be too trivial to be ignored, though some readers will insist on the inverted reading even then. Experiment 4 suggests that readers usually expect to see a non-compositionally licensed verb in depth charge sentences. The influential surprisal theory (Hale, 2001;Levy, 2008a) claims that low predictability of a word in a context increases processing effort, so it is not surprising that compositionally sensible versions of depth charge sentences (No head injury is too trivial to be noticed) are often difficult to understand. However, it might also be argued that readers start out not expecting the anomalous verb, but instead retroactively change their mental representation of the preceding input because they are uncertain as to what they have read, as predicted by the noisy-channel model of language processing (Levy, 2008b). 21 The noisy-or lossy-context surprisal account proposed by Futrell & Levy (2017) and Futrell et al. (2020) would instead assume that by the time readers reach the verb, they have partially forgotten the previous input and thus fail to make the correct prediction. We believe that neither of these accounts offers a good explanation of the depth charge effect: The noisy-channel model assumes that mentally revising the previous input to conform with the unexpected current input is computationally costly, yet our data show no evidence of increased processing cost in the depth charge condition. The noisy-context surprisal model assumes that previous input is simply erased from memory. Given that rereading was the norm in Experiment 2A, it would be surprising if readers remained convinced of the correctness of their misinterpretation even when having had the opportunity to refresh their memory of the input. Regressions do not appear to lead to low ratings for depth charge sentences: In the double negation condition, 62% of trials had at least one regression, and across these, there was a mean of six regressions per trial, indicating several passes over the material. 22 One possible takeaway under the overloading account is that the depth charge effect is like a fishing weir: Once the inverted interpretation has been even tentatively adopted, there is no going back; that is, reanalysis is impossible or near impossible. The alternative view is that once readers have identified the intended meaning of the No X is too Y to Z 20 The same point is also made by (Fortuin, 2014, p. 278), who does not see the role of incrementality as standing in opposition to a construction-based account of the depth charge effect. 21 A different account would claim that readers' expectation for the correct verb is so strong that it simply overrides the aberrant input in depth charge sentences (Pickering & Garrod, 2007). Our results as well as those of O'Connor (2015; 2017) provide evidence against this account. 22 Note that as we divided sentences into three multi-word regions of interest, it is likely that additional inter-word regressions occurred. Still, the mean sensibleness rating across trials with six or more regressions was a little over 5 (95% confidence interval: [4.53, 5.59]), and therefore on the positive side of the scale. For comparison, the mean rating for the more transparently incoherent adjectival negation condition was 3.5.
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/4/509/5924260 by guest on 25 August 2021 construction, they may regress to check if their interpretation is correct, but will mostly stick with the initially assigned semantics.

Outlook
There is no shortage of contexts in which the interpretation of multiple negative elements does not work as expected (e.g. de Dios-Flores, 2019;Horn, 2009;Krifka, 2011).
It is an open question whether the negation-related heuristics we have described are generally applied to sentences with multiple negations, and whether influences of world knowledge on interpretation can be found in different contexts as well. It appears that "negation" or "negative polarity" needs to be understood in a wider sense than just referring to items such as not and no: It also encompasses negative affixes on adjectives, "negative" verbs like ignore, and possibly nouns, as shown by examples such as Loss of virtue is irretrievable, taken from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Beck et al., 2008). Yet another aspect to the processing of depth charge sentences that we have not touched upon in detail is the processing of embedded entailments. The negative quantifier no is downward-entailing, that is, if no head injury has property X, then it follows that any one head injury does not have property X. The too-phrase is also downward-entailing: The tea is too hot to hold and drink does not entail The tea is too hot to drink (inference to a superset), but does entail The tea is too hot to hold and drink quickly (inference to a subset). Furthermore, too-phrases license negative polarity items (The tea is too hot to ever be held), which is usually taken as an indicator of downward-entailingness (Ladusaw, 1980). It is possible that "implicit negation" does not correctly describe the meaning contribution of too, but that the operator's crucial property is that of inverting entailment relations. 23 While we cannot rule out that the depth charge effect is at least partly due to the difficulty induced by having two downward-entailing operators in the sentence (Geurts & van der Slik, 2005), we refrain from offering an account based on entailment processing here, leaving the issue to future work.
In conclusion, we have demonstrated that even multi-faceted phenomena like the depth charge effect can be disassembled in ways that put them within the scope of detailed experimental evaluation of hypotheses, which yields valuable information about the mechanisms involved. In the future, we hope to further hone our empirical and theoretical tools in order to be able to tackle other negation-related phenomena in the literature that have previously been noted as curious anomalies but not been subjected to large-scale experimental investigation, such as the many examples of hypo-and hypernegation given by Horn (2009) andO'Connor (2015). To echo the conclusion of Horn (p. 419), "negation is the un-wizzywig of grammatical categories, where all too often what you see is what you don't get -and vice versa". 23 We do not make the claim that too should necessarily be grouped with elements that introduce "proper" negation, but maintain that "implicit negation" is a fitting term, seeing that the negative inference X should not Z does occur in the presence of the operator. In this context, also compare the claim of Schwarzschild (2008) that too introduces an implicit negated modal verb (can't , shouldn't ) and licenses the use of let alone (This car is too expensive to buy, let alone drive!), as well as Horn's (2009) classification of too as introducing negation.