Although negation is known to challenge large language models (LLMs), benchmarks for evaluating negation understanding—especially in Korean—are scarce. We conduct a corpus-based analysis of Korean negation and show that LLM performance degrades under negation. We then introduce *Thunder-KoNUBench*, a sentence-level negation understanding benchmark that reflects the empirical distribution of Korean negation phenomena. Evaluating 47 LLMs on Thunder-KoNUBench, we analyze the effects of model size and instruction tuning, and perform error analysis to better understand model behavior. We further show that fine-tuning on Thunder-KoNUBench improves negation understanding and broader contextual comprehension in Korean.

Negation is a fundamental linguistic phenomenon that poses ongoing challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in tasks requiring deep semantic understanding. Current benchmarks often treat negation as a minor detail within broader tasks, such as natural language inference. Consequently, there is a lack of benchmarks specifically designed to evaluate comprehension of negation. In this work, we introduce *Thunder-NUBench* — a novel benchmark explicitly created to assess sentence-level understanding of negation in LLMs. Thunder-NUBench goes beyond identifying surface-level cues by contrasting standard negation with structurally diverse alternatives, such as local negation, contradiction, and paraphrase. This benchmark includes manually created sentence-negation pairs and a multiple-choice dataset, allowing for a comprehensive evaluation of models’ understanding of negation.