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Comprehending negated sentences with binary states and locations

Comprehending Negated Sentences With Binary States and Locations Sarah E. Anderson (sec57@cornell.edu) 1 , Stephanie Huette (shuette@ucmerced.edu) 2 , Teenie Matlock (tmatlock@ucmerced.edu) 2 , and Michael J. Spivey (spivey@ucmerced.edu) 2 Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Uris Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, Merced, Merced, CA 95344 USA Abstract Language theorists have argued that processing negated statements (“The eagle is not in the sky,”) differs from affirmative propositions. However, evidence for these claims comes from studies that did not control for the possibility of numerous states (e.g., the eagle is perched on a branch or on the ground). Here, we explore whether constraining this number of possibilities provides more information about processing negation. In Experiment 1, the stimuli described binary states. For example, a coin can be either heads up or tails up; if it is not heads up it is necessarily tails up. In Experiment 2, preceding contexts constrained the number of possible locations of a negated proposition. The results, consistent with earlier evidence for negation’s increased complexity, offer new data suggesting that perceptual simulation of negated proposition may be experimentally detected when the states or locations are sufficiently constrained, using binary states or contextual descriptions. Keywords: Language Processing; Cognition; Perceptual Simulation Negation; Embodied Negation is a fundamental part of everyday communication. Throughout the course of a typical day, people frequently have to report where things are not located, for instance, “Your keys are not on the table” or “My car is not in the garage.” They must also describe events that are not happening, such as, “The Patriots are not playing tonight” or “Your car will not start.” Despite the ubiquity of negated statements, surprisingly little is known about how they are processed and what their conceptual structure is. One of the earliest and most reliable findings about negation is that people are slower to read negated sentences than they are to read affirmative sentences, due to their increased complexity (see Barres & Johnson, 2003; Carpenter & Just, 1975; Chase & Clark, 1972; Mayo, Schul, & Burnstein, 2004). Such findings have provided invaluable insights into sentence processing, but many important questions about processing negation remain. In particular, how do negated statements influence everyday cognition? Are negated sentences comprehended differently than affirmative sentences? The goal here is to further consider negation’s influence on sentence comprehension. Negation has been of interest to philosophers and language theorists for centuries (for review, see Gilbert, 1991), but only recently has its processing received close attention. Early cognitive work on processing suggested that negated statements about spatial relations are processed differently from similar affirmative statements. For instance, participants in Clark and Chase (1972) were presented with sentences followed by pictures and then asked whether the sentence was true or false of a corresponding picture. For example, a “true” trial might consist of the sentence, “The star is above the cross,” followed by a picture with a star above a cross, accurately depicting the relationship expressed by the sentence. Participants responded true or false more quickly to a picture following the sentence, “The star is above the cross,” than to the sentence, “The star is not above the cross.” These differences suggested that affirmative and negated statements are processed differently, but the nature of this difference was unclear. One possibility is that the increased processing time associated with negation is the result of evaluating the core proposition and then applying a negation marker to this proposition. More recent evidence also supports the hypothesis that negating or affirming a statement involves subtly different processes. McKinstry, Dale, and Spivey (2008) presented participants with questions of varying truth-values and asked them to answer “yes” or “no” using a mouse to click on a corresponding, visually presented box on the computer screen. A sentence’s truth-value was defined as the proportion of participants who agreed the statement was true in an on-line survey. Therefore, the question, “Should you brush your teeth every day?” had a truth-value of 1.0, and the question, “Is murder sometimes justifiable?” had a truth value of .6. In addition to recording the end response and reaction time, the trajectory of the mouse as it moved across the computer screen to click on the appropriate answer was also recorded. These mouse-movement trajectories provide a continuous motor response that has been used to illustrate competition between alternatives in a number of cognitive tasks (Dale, Kehoe, & Spivey, 2007; Farmer, Anderson, & Spivey, 2007; Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich, 2005). McKinstry and colleagues’ findings were consistent with those of Clark & Chase (1972) in that participants had more difficulty in evaluating a false statement than a corresponding true statement. Participants were also slower to respond negatively to a statement, and the “no” response trajectories showed more competition than the “yes” response trajectories. Similar effects also arise in research exploring the influence of negation on memory (Fiedler, Walther, Armbruster, Fay, & Naumann, 1996), supporting a general cognitive bias towards affirmative propositions. Similarly, negated and affirmative sentences seem to be handled differently in language comprehension (e.g., Hasson & Glucksberg, 2006; Kaup, 2001; MacDonald & Just, 1989), and this may be due to differences in their corresponding