The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

Abstract

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.

To predict or not to predict: The role of context constraint and truth-value in negation processing.

“…Participants saw visual contexts (e.g., a white square and a blue circle) followed by corresponding sentences (e.g., The square is (not) white/blue) whose predictability was varied depending on whether the two geometrical shapes differed in one (e.g., color; high predictability) or two aspects (color and pattern; low predictability). In contrast to Nieuwland (2016), where the typical truth by polarity interaction pattern was only observed for the conditions where critical nouns had low cloze probability values, in Rück et al (2021) the interaction was more pronounced for the high-predictable compared to the low-predictable condition. The authors suggest that different measures, such as response times or the N400, might reflect different mechanisms and stages of processing and, in particular, may be differently sensitive to predictability.…”

“…Other studies have also shown that the processing load related to negation appears to be significantly reduced if the context licenses the use of negation in a sentence (Dale, 2011;Glenberg et al, 1999;Tian et al, 2010Tian et al, , 2016. Rück et al (2021) investigated the role of the predictability for the truth by polarity interaction in response times. Participants saw visual contexts (e.g., a white square and a blue circle) followed by corresponding sentences (e.g., The square is (not) white/blue) whose predictability was varied depending on whether the two geometrical shapes differed in one (e.g., color; high predictability) or two aspects (color and pattern; low predictability).…”

Following Affirmative and Negated Rules

“…We reason that violating affirmative rules requires a negation, producing both the choice bias and performance costs. If that were the case, we might find more violations and superior violation performance with negated rules, as violating negated rules should reduce the ironic effects (Rück et al., 2021). Future research should, therefore, explore this intriguing intersection of nonconformity and rule formulation.…”

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task

“…To make a choice, the participants pressed 1, 3, 7 or 9 on the number pad, corresponding to the position of the four words on the screen: lower left, lower right, upper left, and upper right, respectively. We have used this type of response mapping in other experiments in our lab (e.g., Rück et al, 2021 ) and find that participants experience little difficulty in mapping the location of the stimuli on the screen to the respective locations of the response keys.…”