Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The interpretation of negated vague predicates, whose meanings depend on underspecified thresholds, is variable. Some positive relative adjectives exhibit asymmetric negative strengthening (not large implies small), whereas negative adjectives generally do not (not small does not imply large). However, the behavior of negated vague quantifiers (e.g., many, few) remains understudied. Previous work also shows that listeners adapt to speakers' thresholds for vague predicates through non-negated assertions, but it is unknown whether such adaptation extends to negated utterances. We investigate whether listeners adapt to speaker thresholds conveyed via negated assertions and whether negated vague quantifiers are interpreted as symmetrically weaker than their antonyms. We find that listeners track speaker thresholds despite negation and interpret negated quantifiers as symmetrically weaker than their antonyms, challenging asymmetric accounts of negative strengthening.