Negation in context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

Abstract

Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated.

A ‘no’ with a trace of ‘yes’: A mouse-tracking study of negative sentence processing

“…ERP studies of negation have focused on the N400 component, and have typically presented 49/67 more varied sentences reliant on long-term 'world knowledge ' (e.g., Fischler et al, 1983;Kounios & Holcomb, 1992;Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008). Eye-tracking studies of negation (e.g., Orenes et al, 2014;Orenes, Moxey, Scheepers, & Santamaría, 2016) make use of the visual world paradigm; this approach requires visual information to be presented concurrently with linguistic input, and hence does not directly involve memory. Our study sits in between these methodologies, as the tasks we have employed rely on the application of newly-acquired, contextually-relevant knowledge stored in short-term memory.…”

There was not, they did not: May negation cause the negated ideas to be remembered as existing?

“…in the political context [8], in the context of prohibitive signs [9], in research on questions and negation as tools of insinuation [10], and in studies on mental control mechanisms [11]. However, it is also important to underline that in the last several years a large of amount research has shown that a delay in negation processing can be alleviated by pragmatics and different semantic contexts [12, 13,14,15,16,17,18]. The context in which the negation occurs may play a primary role in children’s (2–5 years) comprehension of negation [19].…”

Effect of personality on compound reasoning

“…It appears in all human languages, although it does not have the same grammar structure in all of them (Khemlani et al, 2012). Its importance is evidenced by the attention received from various disciplines, especially in the study of propositional reasoning (Macbeth et al, 2013;Macbeth, Razumiejczyk, Crivello, Fioramonti, & Pereyra-Girardi, 2015;Orenes et al, 2016).…”

“…This phenomenon, easily explained by mathematical logic (Macbeth, Crivello, Fioramonti, Razumiejczyk, 2017a), nevertheless presents some difficulties when processed by the human mind. Some approaches tried to account for this complexity and proposed the intervention of pragmatic (Horn, 1989;Horn & Ward, 2005;Orenes, Moxey, Scheepers, & Santamaría, 2016), contextual (Sperber & Wilson, 1986;Wilson & Sperber, 1994) and conversational (Bott & Noveck, 2004;Grice, 1989) factors. Despite these efforts, it was not however until the proposal of Johnson-Laird (2012, 2014) that a complete Theory of Negation was presented.…”