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It has been widely accepted that the comprehension of a sentence involves the process of both interpreting sentence’s meaning and understanding how that sentence is relevant to the context. The time-sensitive data collected from comprehension tasks suggested that these two processes are incremental and interactive （Tian， 2016）. In this paper， we outline the ideas that relevance is achieved incrementally， and discuss a study of negation processing to support this idea.
“Question under discussion” （QUDs; see Ginzburg， in press） is a term to describe the relevance achieving process. It characterizes relevance as a set of semantic inquiries that require to be solved. According to Roberts （2012）， the concept is developed based on his idea of information structure， a structure on pursuing inquiry in discourse and acquiring information that inquiry yields. The basic idea is that language users represent parts of utterances as questions， and whatever utterances they encounter， they tend to project the most prominent QUDs of it to achieve relevance. The property of QUDs indicates its computation process to be incremental. The prominence of QUDs change as discourse unfolds， and can be adjusted by a mechanism of accommodation. This kind of adjustment is in response to features of the utterances offered. What’s more， QUDs accommodation happens in parallel with the content processing， and the likely QUD of an utterance is anticipatory.
The current study of negation processing provides an evidence for the incremental computation of QUD （Tian， 2016）.
For decades， it has been observed that negation processing is difficult without context since that it takes longer to process and there are more errors occur compared with the processing of positive sentences （Wason， 1965; Clark
“Question under discussion” （QUDs; see Ginzburg， in press） is a term to describe the relevance achieving process. It characterizes relevance as a set of semantic inquiries that require to be solved. According to Roberts （2012）， the concept is developed based on his idea of information structure， a structure on pursuing inquiry in discourse and acquiring information that inquiry yields. The basic idea is that language users represent parts of utterances as questions， and whatever utterances they encounter， they tend to project the most prominent QUDs of it to achieve relevance. The property of QUDs indicates its computation process to be incremental. The prominence of QUDs change as discourse unfolds， and can be adjusted by a mechanism of accommodation. This kind of adjustment is in response to features of the utterances offered. What’s more， QUDs accommodation happens in parallel with the content processing， and the likely QUD of an utterance is anticipatory.
The current study of negation processing provides an evidence for the incremental computation of QUD （Tian， 2016）.
For decades， it has been observed that negation processing is difficult without context since that it takes longer to process and there are more errors occur compared with the processing of positive sentences （Wason， 1965; Clark