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Presupposition Processing andthe (Re)activation of NegatedConceptsKevin S. Autrya & William H. Levinea
a Department of Psychology, University of ArkansasAccepted author version posted online: 12 Dec2013.Published online: 05 Sep 2014.
To cite this article: Kevin S. Autry & William H. Levine (2014) PresuppositionProcessing and the (Re)activation of Negated Concepts, Discourse Processes, 51:7,535-564, DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2013.871192
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Presupposition Processing and the(Re)activation of Negated Concepts
Kevin S. Autry and William H. LevineDepartment of Psychology
University of Arkansas
Negated words take longer to recognize than non-negated words following
sentences with negation, suggesting that negated concepts are less active. The
present experiments tested the possibility that this reduced activation would not
persist beyond immediate testing. Experiment 1 used a probe task and materials
similar to those used in previous research but manipulated the timing of the probe.
The negation effect was present at 0ms, replicating previous studies, but not at
500ms or 1,000ms, suggesting that unlicensed negated concepts are initially
reduced in activation but then reactivated by presuppositional processing.
Experiment 2 produced similar results when activation was measured during
ongoing comprehension and reading time was controlled, and Experiment 3
demonstrated that these effects occur when negation is unlicensed but not when it is
licensed. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the reduced
activation seen from unlicensed negation is short-lived.
INTRODUCTION
Early research on the processing of negation demonstrated that verifying the truth
of a sentence against pictures (Clark & Chase, 1972; Gough, 1961; Just &
Carpenter, 1971) or general world knowledge (Sherman, 1973; Wason, 1961)
takes more time when the sentence contains a semantic negation (e.g., no, not)
535
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kevin S. Autry, Department of
Psychology, University of Arkansas, Memorial Hall 216, Fayetteville, AR 72702, USA. E-mail:
Discourse Processes, 51:535–564, 2014
Copyright q Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0163-853X print/1532-6950 online
DOI: 10.1080/0163853X.2013.871192
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compared with an equivalent affirmative sentence. Negation not only delays
verification but also leads to longer reading times than affirmatives (Glenberg,
Robertson, Jansen, & Johnson-Glenberg, 1999). These effects on verification and
reading times can both be attributed to the processes involved in representing
negation. For example, to comprehend the sentence in (1),
(1) The star isn’t above the plus
(2) above (star, plus)
(3) : above (star, plus)
the reader would first need to extract the proposition representing the affirmative
state of affairs that is being denied by the negation, as in (2). Only after this
proposition is constructed would the reader be able to attach a negation operator
(i.e., : ) to reverse the truth value of the proposition, as in (3). Neither of these steps
is necessary for comprehending an affirmative statement and can therefore account
for the slower verification and reading times demonstrated in the literature.
In addition to reversing the truth value of a proposition, the negation operator
also appears to limit the activation of concepts within its scope by shifting focus
elsewhere (MacDonald & Just, 1989). Therefore, the affirmative state of affairs
should be less active when the sentence is negated than when it is non-negated
(i.e., a negation effect).1 Several studies have provided support for this negation
effect, the most prominent being the results reported by MacDonald and Just. In
their study, subjects read sentences in which one of two direct objects was
negated (e.g., Almost every weekend, Elizabeth bakes bread but no cookies) and
immediately completed a probe recognition or naming task in which the probe
was either the negated (e.g., cookies) or non-negated noun (e.g., bread). On both
measures, subjects took less time to respond to concepts when they were non-
negated than when they were negated. Based on the assumption of the probe tasks
that speed of responding is a function of the activation level of the probe word,
these results suggest the negated concepts were less active in the subjects’ mental
representation of the sentences than the non-negated concepts.
A similar study by Kaup (2001) provided further evidence for the negation
effect. In one experiment, subjects read passages that included a sentence
describing the creation of one item but not another (e.g., Sarah is building a chair
but not a table2), followed by a probe recognition task in which the probes were
the direct objects of the target sentence. The results replicated those of
MacDonald and Just (1989): A negation effect emerged such that subjects were
1It is worth noting that although the negated concept should be reduced in activation, it should still
be more active than an unmentioned baseline (see ironic suppression, e.g., Wegner & Erber, 1992).2This is translated from the original German used by Kaup (2001).
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faster to respond to the non-negated than the negated nouns, providing
converging evidence that negation limits the activation of concepts within its
scope. In a second experiment using the same methodology, subjects read
sentences that described the destruction of one item but not another (e.g., Peter
burns the old bed but not the big cupboard). In the case of destruction sentences,
there was still a negation effect, but it was reduced in magnitude compared with
the creation sentences. This suggests the presence of the negation operator and
what is asserted by a sentence each influence the activation of a negated concept.
In the case of a creation sentence like Sarah is building a chair but not a table,
what is asserted is a situation in which a chair is present or will be soon but in
which there is no table. Kaup argued this situational presence (cf. van Dijk &
Kintsch, 1983; Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998) was critical for the negation effect to
emerge. By contrast, in the case of a destruction sentence like Peter burns the bed
but not the cupboard, what is asserted is a situation in which a cupboard continues
to exist but a bed will soon no longer exist. In the latter case, the still-present
negation effect was proposed by Kaup to be due to the negation operator making
information within its scope less accessible, but the reduction in size of the
negation effect was attributed to the imminent nonexistence of the bed.
Although these and other studies (e.g., Hasson & Glucksberg, 2006; Kaup &
Zwaan, 2003) have provided evidence that negated concepts are represented at a
reduced level of activation, an idea proposed Levine and Hagaman (2008), the
pragmatic-inference hypothesis, predicts that contextual factors may lead to
negated concepts being just as active as non-negated concepts (for similar
proposals see Giora, Fein, Aschkenazi, & Alkabets-Zlozover, 2007; Nieuwland
& Kuperberg, 2008; Tian, Breheny, & Ferguson, 2010). For example, consider
the statement, Carol made a cake but not a pie. Without a context that
presupposes the baking of a pie either explicitly (e.g., Carol previously stated her
intention to make a pie) or implicitly (e.g., Carol is known for making pies), the
negation is unlicensed. This makes the statement seem infelicitous, because it
violates Grice’s (1975) maxims of quantity and relevance (e.g., there is no reason
to deny that Carol made a pie unless there was an expectation that Carol would
make a pie). The unlicensed negation predicates new information of Carol that is
underinformative because if Carol did not make a pie, then the truth of the
sentence is consistent with essentially an infinite number of states of reality.
Moreover, using negation to provide (underinformative) new information is
pragmatically odd (cf. Grice, 1975).
Because we expect people to include only relevant information in their
statements (Grice, 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986), when an underinformative
negation is used to introduce new information, one must infer the presupposition
that is being denied (e.g., that Carol had planned to make a pie) (Levine &
Hagaman, 2008; Tian et al., 2010). This processing is necessary for the
communication to remain coherent, but it comes at a cost: Additional processing
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must occur to infer the presupposition. This processing should increase the
activation of the negated concept, which is a component of the presupposition
being inferred, returning the negated concept closer to the activation level of non-
negated concepts. This general idea that context (or lack thereof) plays an
important role in the representation of negated concepts is not without precedent.
In fact, many studies have shown that sentences containing negation are
processed differently when they appear in isolation than when they appear in a
context with a relevant presupposition (Beukeboom, Finkenauer, & Wigboldus,
2010; Green, 1970; Johnson-Laird & Tridgell, 1973; Nieuwland & Kuperberg,
2008; Nieuwland & Martin, 2012; Tian et al., 2010; Wason, 1965).
Levine and Hagaman (2008) tested the pragmatic-inference hypothesis by
having subjects read short passages with a sentence containing two items from
the same taxonomic category or two items from different taxonomic categories,
as in (1a) and (1b) below. Each of these sentences was followed by an identical
reference sentence like (2) below that referred back to the non-negated concept
with a categorical anaphor.
(1a) Justin bought a mango but not an apple.
(1b) Justin bought a mango but not any water.
(2) He ate the fruit in his kitchen.
The reference sentence took longer to read when it was preceded by two items
from the same taxonomic category than when the items were from different
taxonomic categories. This reading time difference suggests that subjects were
considering the category-consistent, negated concepts (e.g., apple) as potential
antecedents, despite them being negated, and the availability of these negated
concepts for anaphoric reference suggests that they remained active (see also
Shuval & Hemforth, 2008). In a second experiment, subjects read passages like
those above in which the reference sentence’s presence was manipulated (i.e., a
sentence like (2) was present only half the time); at the end of the experiment,
subjects were given a surprise cued recall task using the anaphoric category labels
(e.g., fruit) as cues. Subjects were equally likely to recall negated and non-
negated concepts that were not referred to anaphorically and more likely to recall
negated concepts that had served as a distractor during anaphoric processing (as
in (1a) above) than non-negated concepts that were not referred to. These results
indicate that negated concepts were considered as anaphoric referents in manner
similar to non-negated distractors (e.g., Levine, Guzman, & Klin, 2000), which
demonstrates that negated concepts can persist at high levels of activation.
Given the hypothesis that additional inferential processing of presuppositions
will occur for unlicensed negation, the time at which the activation of the concept
is measured should be an important factor. At least two studies on this kind of
inferential processing have demonstrated that the processing of a sentence’s
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implicit presuppositions is completed after the processing of its assertions
(Hornby, 1974; Langford & Holmes, 1979) rather than before. It is unclear in the
existing literature whether this occurs because inferential processing is a serial
process (e.g., presupposition processing begins after assertion processing is
completed) or a simultaneous process (e.g., presupposition and assertion
processing begin at the same time, but presupposition processing takes longer to
complete). For the present purposes, we assume that presupposition processing is
not completed until some point after assertion processing. This should cause the
activation level of the negated concept to vary across time. In a sentence like Tina
prepared a lecture but not an activity, sometime after the negation occurs,
processing what is asserted (i.e., a lecture was prepared but not an activity) should
result in a shift of activation away from the negated concept (Kaup, 2001;
MacDonald & Just, 1989). At a later point, inferring the presuppositions
associated with the negation (e.g., was there an expectation that an activity would
be prepared?) should shift attention back to the negated concept because it is part
of the presupposition. Therefore, if activation is measured at an early point when
assertion processing is complete and presupposition processing is not, negated
concepts should be represented at a lower level of activation than non-negated
concepts. However, if activation is measured later, after presupposition
processing has been allowed to run to completion, then there should be a
reduced or negligible difference in the activation level of negated and non-
negated concepts.
Both experiments by Levine and Hagaman (2008) measured the activation of
negated concepts after a delay, allowing sufficient time for the presupposition
processing to increase the concept’s activation level. A related study by Autry
and Levine (2012) provided further evidence that negated concepts become
reactivated after a delay. In one experiment, subjects read a short context (e.g.,
Justin got up early to exercise. He jogged and stopped at the store afterward.)
followed by a sentence containing negation (e.g., Justin bought a mango but not
an apple) or not (e.g., Justin bought a mango and an apple). After reading,
subjects wrote a single-sentence continuation; this offline task likely provided
sufficient time for presupposition processing to occur. The continuations revealed
that the subjects wrote about concepts more often when they had been negated
than when they had been non-negated. The higher frequency of producing the
negated concepts suggests they were more active than non-negated concepts,
providing an even stronger demonstration of the pragmatic-inference hypothesis.
Given these findings, the present experiments were designed to systematically
assess the effects of processing time on the activation of negated concepts
following unlicensed negation. The first experiment replicated and extended
MacDonald and Just’s (1989) research. Using similar materials and procedures,
the activation level of the negated concepts was measured at various delays after
comprehension was completed to assess changes across time. The second
(RE)ACTIVATION OF NEGATED CONCEPTS 539
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experiment used a modified procedure with better control over timing to assess
the activation level of negated concepts during rather than after comprehension.
The third experiment was designed to examine the effect of licensing context on
the representation of negation.
EXPERIMENT 1
Experiment 1 used materials similar to those used in MacDonald and Just’s
(1989) experiments but also systematically varied the delay between the end of
the sentence and a probe recognition task. Subjects read single experimental
sentences (Table 1) that contained two direct objects, neither of which was
negated (e.g., Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture and an activity for her
students), a similar sentence in which Noun1 (i.e., the first direct object) was
negated (e.g., Every Friday Tina prepared not a lecture but only an activity for
her students), or a similar sentence in which Noun2 (i.e., the second direct object)
was negated (e.g. Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture but not an activity for her
students). After reading each experimental sentence, subjects completed a probe
recognition task in which they verified whether or not a given word was presented
in the sentence. The probe words were either Noun1 or Noun2 and were
presented 0ms, 500ms, or 1,000ms after the subject finished reading a sentence.
The sentence type and probe word manipulations were within subjects and the
delay manipulation was between subjects. Additionally, subjects verified a
comprehension statement (e.g., Tina prepared a lecture for her students) after
each sentence to ensure they were reading carefully.
TABLE 1
Sample Passages From Experiment 1
Experimental passage
Noun1 Negated
Every Friday Tina prepared not a lecture but only an activity for her students.
Noun2 Negated
Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture but not an activity for her students.
No Negation
Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture and an activity for her students.
Probe Words
Noun1: LECTURE
Noun2: ACTIVITY
Filler passages
A well-known critic, Isabella reviewed books and movies for the local newspaper.
Probe: MOVIES
While waiting at the DMV, Chloe made an origami crane out of scrap paper.
Probe: FROG
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The levels of the delay manipulation were chosen so the longest delay (i.e.,
1,000ms) was long enough after the time at which MacDonald and Just’s (1989)
probe task occurred (i.e., immediately after reading) that presupposition processing
should be complete. Evidence that the full processing of negation takes about
1,000ms after reading to run to completion comes from Hasson and Glucksberg’s
(2006) research, in which negative metaphors (e.g., The train to Boston is no
rocket) were shown to facilitate metaphor-incompatible meanings (e.g., fast) at
short delays (i.e., 150 and 500ms after reading) but that 1,000ms after reading only
ametaphor-compatiblemeaning (e.g., slow)was facilitated. The 500-ms delaywas
chosen as the halfway point between the 0-ms and 1,000-ms delay to provide
interim information about presupposition processing. It was hypothesized that if
presupposition processing is completed within 1,000ms and if this processing
counteracts the reduced activation that occurs during assertion processing, subjects
should have longer recognition times for negated concepts only when the probe
recognition task occurs before the completion of presupposition processing,
creating a negation by delay interaction. On this basis, it was expected that in the 0-
ms delay condition, subjects would respond slower to probe words when they were
negated in the statement than when they were non-negated, replicating the findings
of MacDonald and Just. If presupposition processing has run to completion by
1,000ms, negated entities should have been reactivated,making them equally if not
more active than non-negated entities at the 1,000-ms delay.
Methods
Subjects
One hundred sixty-eight students enrolled in a general psychology course at the
University of Arkansas participated in the experiment to partially fulfill a
research requirement. All subjects were native-English speakers.
Materials and Design
Forty-two experimental sentences appeared in one of three conditions (Table 1).
Each sentence presented a character by proper name (half stereotypically male,
half stereotypically female) followed by a past-tense action verb and a compound
direct object with two nouns that were selected to be of similar length but not
close semantic associates. The sentences were manipulated such that negation
occurred for the first direct object (Noun1 Negated), the second direct object
(Noun2 Negated), or neither direct object (No Negation). In addition, there were
58 filler sentences. About half of these filler sentences had syntactic structures
similar to the three experimental conditions, whereas the rest varied the number
of negations and syntactic structure to help mask the manipulation. In addition,
each experimental and filler sentence had a comprehension statement (e.g., Tina
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prepared a lecture), half of which required a “yes” response and half of which
required a “no” response.
Subjects saw each experimental sentence in one of the delay conditions along
with all filler sentences. Twelve counterbalanced lists of experimental sentences
were created within each of three delay conditions (i.e., 0-, 500-, and 1,000-ms
delay) with the following constraints: One-third of the experimental sentences in
a list were of each sentence condition (Noun1 Negated, Noun2 Negated, and No
Negation), and half of the nouns probed in each sentence condition were Noun1
and half were Noun2. Furthermore, across lists, each sentence appeared in each
sentence condition one-third of the time, half the time with Noun1 being probed
and half the time with Noun2 being probed. The experimental trials never
contained a probe requiring a “no” response (i.e., new words). To ensure that each
recognition answer occurred equally often, most filler trials contained probes
requiring a “no” response. Finally, a second set of experimental materials was
created that reversed the order of the nouns, such that Noun1 and Noun2 switched
position. Thus, each subject was presented with 100 total trials, with half of the
probes and comprehension statements requiring “yes” responses and half
requiring “no” responses. The manipulation of the factors of theoretical interest
resulted in a design that was 3 (sentence: Noun1 Negated, Noun2 Negated, No
Negation) £ 2 (probe word: Noun1, Noun2) £ 3 (delay: 0ms, 500ms, 1,000ms),
with the latter being manipulated between subjects.
Procedure
Before the experiment, subjects completed three practice blocks to familiarize
themselves with the response keys and the probe recognition and comprehension
tasks. During the experiment, each trial consisted of a sentence, a probe word,
and a comprehension statement. At the beginning of each trial, subjects were
given the instruction “PRESS THE SPACEBAR WHEN READY.” The full
experimental or filler sentence then appeared centered on the screen and
remained until the subject pressed the spacebar to indicate they had finished
reading. After each experimental sentence, subjects were presented with a probe
word that was either Noun1 or Noun2. After each filler sentence, the probe word
was any word from the sentence or a false (i.e., new) probe. The probes were
presented either 0ms, 500ms, or 1,000ms (manipulated between subjects) after
the subject pressed the spacebar, and subjects indicated whether the probe word
had occurred in the sentence with a “yes” or “no” key press. Each trial concluded
with subjects responding to a comprehension statement.
The experimental session consisted of 100 trials (42 experimental, 58 filler) in
four blocks of 25 trials. The order of the blocks and the order of the trials within
blocks were randomized with the restriction that the first statement of each block
was a filler. Subjects were instructed to read the sentences as they normally would
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for comprehension and to respond to the probe words as quickly and accurately as
possible. The experiment lasted 30 to 45 minutes.
Results
Data Exclusion and General Analytic Considerations
For each subject, all correct probe reaction times greater than 2,000ms and less
than 400ms were classified as outliers, as were correct probe reaction times that
were more than 1.5 times the interquartile range above the 75th percentile or less
than the 25th percentile for that subject (Tukey, 1977). The data from 20 subjects
were excluded from further analysis due to having fewer than 75% usable (i.e.,
accurate and non-outlying) probe responses on experimental items (n ¼ 12) or
having probe accuracy of less than 75% on both filler and experimental items
(n ¼ 8). There remained 51 subjects in the 0-ms delay condition, 49 in the 500-
ms delay condition, and 48 in the 1,000-ms delay condition. For these subjects,
8.7% of probe reaction times were excluded from further analysis as outliers. For
all experiments reported in this article, subject and item condition means were
analyzed separately; a subscript of 1 indicates that subjects were treated as a
random variable, whereas a subscript of 2 indicates that items were treated as a
random variable. For all significance tests, an alpha level of .05 was used. For all
repeated-measures effects with more than one numerator df, Huynh-Feldt
adjusted p values are reported to correct for sphericity violations. Effect-size
measures that are reported are based on subjects’ analyses.
Comprehension Statements
Overall comprehension for experimental items across all conditions and subjects
was 89.9%. There was little variation in comprehension as a function of the
experimental manipulations. Across delays comprehension was virtually
constant: 89.4% at 0ms, 90.1% at 500ms, and 90.2% at 1,000ms. A 3
(sentence: Noun1 Negated, Noun2 Negated, No Negation) £ 2 (probe: Noun1,
Noun2) £ 3 (delay: 0, 500, 1,000ms) mixed-factor ANOVA with repeated-
measures on the first two factors in the subject analysis and on all three factors in
the item analysis showed no significant main effects or interactions (all F , 2.5,
all p . .09).
Recognition Probes
0-ms delay. Reaction time means as a function of sentence condition and
noun probed appear in Figure 1 (see also Table 2). The results closely resemble
those reported by MacDonald and Just (1989, Experiment 1), with response times
to negated nouns being slower than when the same nouns were not negated. A 3
(RE)ACTIVATION OF NEGATED CONCEPTS 543
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(sentence: Noun1 negated, Noun2 negated, no negation) £ 2 (probe: Noun1,
Noun2) repeated-measures ANOVA showed a significant sentence-by-probe
interaction, F1(2, 100) ¼ 26.24, p , .001, F2(2, 166) ¼ 24.56, p , .001,
h2p ¼ .34. The main effect of sentence was not significant, F1(2, 100) ¼ 1.09,
p ¼ .34, F2 , 1, but the effect of probe was in the by-items analysis and nearly so
in the by-subject analysis, F1(1, 50) ¼ 3.36, p ¼ .07, F2(1, 83) ¼ 5.26, p ¼ .02,
h2p ¼ .06.
Response times to Noun1 when it was negated (M ¼ 936ms, SE ¼ 23.5) were
significantly slower than when it was not negated (M ¼ 866ms, SE ¼ 21.0),
t1(50) ¼ 4.06, p , .001, t2(83) ¼ 3.61, p ¼ .001, d ¼ 0.57. The same pattern,
albeit with a slightly smaller effect, emerged for Noun2, with significantly slower
response times when it was negated (M ¼ 907ms, SE ¼ 19.6) than when it was
not negated (M ¼ 870ms, SE ¼ 21.6), t1(50) ¼ 2.50, p ¼ .02, t2(83) ¼ 2.45,
p ¼ .02, d ¼ 0.35.
Experimental probe-response accuracies as a function of sentence condition
and noun probed appear in Table 2. Although accuracies were in general quite
high (i.e., over 95% in all conditions), the results mirror the reaction-time data in
that accuracy was lowest where reaction time was longest and highest where
reaction time was shortest. Thus, there is no evidence of a speed–accuracy trade-
off. A 3 (sentence: Noun1 Negated, Noun2 Negated, No Negation) £ 2 (probe:
Noun1, Noun2) repeated-measures ANOVA revealed no significant main effects
FIGURE 1 Mean correct-probe reaction times for Noun1 and Noun2 by sentence type in
Experiment 1. Error bars represent ^1 SE, computed based on recommendations by Loftus and
Masson (1994).
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(all p . .10), but the interaction of sentence and probe was significant, F1(2,
100) ¼ 14.39, p , .001, F2(2, 166) ¼ 11.31, p , .001, h2p ¼ .22.
500-ms and 1,000-ms delay. In the 500- and 1,000-ms delay conditions
(Table 2), the critical sentence-by-probe interactions were nonsignificant, all
F , 1.8, indicating that the effect of negation on probe response time is not long-
lasting. The only effect to emerge in these two longer-delay conditions was a
significant main effect of sentence in the 500-ms condition, F1(2, 96) ¼ 4.00,
p ¼ .07, F2(2, 166) ¼ 2.74, p ¼ .02, h2p ¼ .08, due primarily to generally longer
response times following Noun2-negated sentences. In no case was the negation
effect significant (all p . .18).
Experimental probe-response accuracies for the 500-ms and 1,000-ms delay
conditions as a function of sentence condition and noun probed appear in Table 2.
In the 500-ms delay condition, no effects were significant (all p . .15). In the
1,000-ms condition, there was a significant sentence-by-noun interaction,
F1(2, 94) ¼ 3.89, p ¼ .02, F2(2, 166) ¼ 4.00, p ¼ .02, h2p ¼ .08, reflecting that
accuracy for Noun1 in the No Negation condition and for Noun2 in the Noun2
Negated condition were lower than the other four conditions. Because there is no
TABLE 2
Mean Correct-Probe Reaction Times (RT; in ms) and Accuracy (Acc; in %) as a Function of
Condition in Experiment 1 (Standard Error)
Probe Word
Noun1 Noun2
RT Acc RT Acc
Delay ¼ 0ms
Sentence
No Negation 866 (22) 97.8 (0.7) 870 (23) 95.8 (0.9)
Noun1 Negated 936 (24) 96.6 (0.9) 826 (22) 99.7 (0.3)
Noun2 Negated 850 (24) 99.7 (0.3) 907 (23) 95.0 (1.2)
Delay ¼ 500ms
Sentence
No Negation 771 (18) 98.0 (1.2) 783 (19) 96.8 (1.0)
Noun1 Negated 793 (21) 95.9 (1.2) 776 (18) 98.3 (0.8)
Noun2 Negated 815 (20) 95.6 (1.3) 799 (22) 95.6 (1.0)
Delay ¼ 1,000ms
Sentence
No Negation 863 (28) 94.6 (1.3) 880 (28) 97.9 (0.8)
Noun1 Negated 888 (28) 97.6 (0.8) 867 (30) 97.6 (0.9)
Noun2 Negated 849 (28) 97.3 (0.8) 880 (28) 94.6 (1.2)
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evidence of a speed–accuracy trade-off and because this effect does not map onto
any theoretical predictions, we did not attempt to interpret it.
Combined reaction-time analyses. To verify the negation effect that was
present at the 0-ms delay was reduced at the longer delays, we first conducted a 3
(sentence: Noun1 Negated, Noun2 Negated, No Negation) £ 2 (probe: Noun1,
Noun2) £ 3 (delay: 0, 500, 1,000ms)mixed-factorANOVAwith repeatedmeasures
on the first two factors in the subject analysis and on all three factors in the item
analysis. The sentence-by-probe interaction was significant, F1(2, 290) ¼ 12.92,
p , .001, F2(2, 162) ¼ 9.45, p , .001, h2p ¼ .08, reflecting that the pattern across
all three delays generally showed a negation effect like that seen at the 0-ms delay,
although itwas clearly reduced inmagnitude at the longer delays. This observation is
verified by the three-factor interaction’s significance, F1(4, 290) ¼ 5.35, p , .001,
F2(4, 324) ¼ 5.16, p ¼ .001, h2p ¼ .07, providing strong statistical support for the
claim that the negation effect was reduced at the longer delays.
To provide further statistical support for this claim, for each subject and each
item a Noun1 and a Noun2 negation effect was computed by subtracting non-
negated reaction times from negated reaction times, such that positive values
indicated slower responding when a noun was negated (Figure 2), and a contrast
was computed to compare the 0-ms negation effect to the combined 500- and
1,000-ms effect. The negation effect for Noun1 was significantly larger by
subjects at 0ms than it was at the later delays, t1(145) ¼ 2.28, p ¼ .02, although
not by items, t2(83) ¼ 1.59, p ¼ .12. Despite the same pattern and clearly
declining negation effect as delay increased, the same contrast was not significant
for Noun2, t(145) ¼ 1.30, p ¼ .20, t2(81)3 ¼ 0.94, p ¼ .35. This difference
between noun positions may have been due to the atypical sentence constructions
FIGURE 2 Negation effect for Noun1 and Noun2 by delay in Experiment 1. Error bars represent
þ1 SE for the Negation–No Negation difference score.
546 AUTRY AND LEVINE
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used in the experiment. Although the sentences were based on MacDonald and
Just’s (1989) materials, the structure of the Noun1 Negated condition (i.e., no X
but only Y) is awkward in English. This may lead to additional processing of the
negated concepts in the Noun1 position and may explain why the Noun1 negation
effect is larger than that of Noun2.
In the three-factor ANOVA, there was also a significant main effect of delay,
F1(2, 145) ¼ 5.60, p ¼ .005, F2(2, 162) ¼ 89.25, p , .001. Pairwise compari-
sons using Tukey’s HSD revealed that reaction times in the 500-ms delay
(M ¼ 789ms, SE ¼ 20.6) were significantly shorter than either the 0-ms delay
(M ¼ 876, SE ¼ 20.2) or the 1,000-ms delay (M ¼ 871, SE ¼ 20.8), which
were not significantly different from each other.
Discussion
Overall, the results of Experiment 1 confirm the prediction that the negation
effect changes across time. As hypothesized, a negation effect was evident at a
delay of 0ms, with subjects responding slower to concepts when they had been
negated than when they had not been negated, replicating the findings of
MacDonald and Just (1989) and Kaup (2001). This result suggests that at the end
of the negation sentence, the processing of the sentence’s assertions shifts
activation away from the negated concepts to create a representation consistent
with the actual state of affairs asserted in the sentence.
However, the negation effect was not significant at a delay of 500 or 1,000ms.
This finding suggests the negation effect found immediately after the sentence is
counteracted by presupposition processing, consistent with the hypothesis that
the reduction in activation is short-lived. Although the reaction time difference
for negated and non-negated concepts was not significant at 500 or 1,000ms, this
small negation effect was even smaller at 1,000ms than at 500ms, suggesting
that further reactivation of the negated concepts occurred between the 500- and
1,000-ms delays. Thus, it appears that presupposition processing begins within
500ms of the end of a sentence and continues between 500 and 1,000ms after the
sentence. Because the activation level of the concepts was not measured beyond
1,000ms, it is unclear whether presupposition processing is complete by
1,000ms or if it continues. It is possible, given the pattern of reactivation, that if
presupposition processing continues beyond 1,000ms, then the negated concepts
could become even more active than non-negated concepts (cf. Autry & Levine,
2012).
3Two items had no correct, non-outlying observations in the Noun2 Negated, 1,000-ms delay
condition, resulting in the loss of 2 df.
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In addition, an unexpected effect emerged in the mean reaction times across
delays. Subjects responded significantly faster to the probe words at the 500-ms
delay compared with the 0-ms delay. One explanation for faster responses after a
delay is that subjects are still engaging in sentence wrap-up processing at 0ms
(cf. Klin, 1995). From this perspective, subjects’ responses at the 1,000-ms delay
condition should be equally fast or faster than at the 500-ms delay because they
had even more time to finish processing the sentence. However, reaction times at
the 1,000-ms delay were significantly longer than at the 500-ms delay, reverting
back to about the same times seen at the 0-ms delay. These results are more
consistent with the possibility that the reaction time differences seen across
delays were caused by the allocation of subjects’ attention. It may be that 500ms
allows subjects sufficient time to shift their attention from processing the
sentence to responding to the probe task, but that 1,000ms is too long and
subjects’ attention begins to shift away when a full second elapsed between the
end of the sentence and the presentation of the probe word. The increased
reaction times might therefore reflect the need for subjects to return their
attention to the probe task; however, this post-hoc explanation cannot be verified
with the current data. Whatever the cause of the fluctuation in reaction time
across delays, it complicates interpretation of the change in activation level of
negated concepts across time. Whereas the negation effect clearly diminished
with time, we are unable to argue strongly that activation of the negated concepts
increased as more time for presupposition processing accrued. Experiment 2 was
designed with changes in methodology to more tightly control the timing of the
probe task and subjects’ attention, with the goal being to allow a clearer view of
the change in activation of negated concepts as time passes.
EXPERIMENT 2
Experiment 2 was designed to examine the representation of negated concepts
during comprehension to extend and clarify the findings of Experiment 1, in
which the probe task occurred only after comprehension. In this experiment, the
materials from Experiment 1 were modified by adding an additional sentence to
each passage so that subjects would continue reading after the end of the first
sentence and the presentation of the probe word. Additionally, the sentences were
presented word by word at a fixed pace, enabling the probe word, which was
restricted to Noun1 in this experiment, to occur at predetermined intervals within
the second sentence. These intervals were selected to be similar to the delays in
Experiment 1. These modifications controlled for individual differences in
reading speed by imposing a constant time between Noun1 and the probe word
and allowed the manipulation of the probe delay within subjects. Moreover,
because the probe task occurred during rather than after comprehension, subjects’
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attention should be more or less equivalent across the different delays. This
should allow a cleaner comparison of reaction times at the different delays.
It was expected that probing concepts during comprehension would produce
results similar to Experiment 1, with the exception that there should be no main
effect of the probe positions. As in Experiment 1, negated concepts were
expected to be less active than non-negated concepts in the probe position
analogous to the 0-ms delay (i.e., at the end of the first sentence), but this negation
effect was not expected at the probe positions corresponding to the 500- and
1,000-ms delays (i.e., after the second and third word of the second sentence,
respectively). Furthermore, it was hypothesized that over time non-negated
concepts would decrease in activation and negated concepts would increase in
activation as assertion processing gives way to presupposition processing.
Methods
Subjects
Seventy-two students enrolled in a general psychology course at the University
of Arkansas participated in the experiment to partially fulfill a research
requirement. All subjects were native-English speakers and had not participated
in Experiment 1.
Materials and Design
The 42 sentences from Experiment 1’s Noun1 Negated and Noun2 Negated
conditions were used. These were then revised to include a second sentence that
did not refer to either of the first-sentence direct objects in its first several words
to avoid reactivating the concepts before the presentation of the probe word
(Table 3). Typically, this was done by using a fronted adverbial phrase (e.g.,
Usually during lunchtime). Because the negation effect was more pronounced for
Noun1 than for Noun2 in Experiment 1, the probe words for experimental items
were restricted to Noun1 only. This meant that the same probe word (i.e., Noun1)
was always negated in the Noun1 Negated condition and always non-negated in
TABLE 3
Sample Experimental Passage From Experiment 2
Noun1 Negated
Every Friday Tina prepared not a lecture but only an activity for her students.
P1 Usually during P2 lunchtime P3, she would plan things out.
Noun2 Negated
Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture but not an activity for her students.
P1 Usually during P2 lunchtime P3, she would plan things out.
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the Noun2 Negated condition. The probe words appeared in one of three
positions, chosen to be similar to the timing of the delays in Experiment 1: after
the last word of the first sentence (Position 1; P1), replicating closely the 0-ms
condition in Experiment 1; after the second word of the second sentence (Position
2; P2); or after the third word of the second sentence (Position 3; P3). Probe
position was manipulated within subjects. Six lists of experimental passages were
created with the following constraints: Half of the experimental passages in a list
were Noun1 Negated and the other half were Noun2 Negated, and one-third of
the passages had a probe word in each of the three probe positions. As in
Experiment 1, all experimental probe words required a “yes” response and were
followed by a yes/no comprehension statement.
Filler items (n ¼ 58) also had a second sentence appended that were varied in
structure to mask the manipulations. The probe words in the fillers occurred in
positions other than those used for the experimental sentences to reduce the
subjects’ ability to anticipate probes.
Procedure
The procedure was identical to Experiment 1 except the sentences were presented
using a serial visual presentation procedure. After the subject pressed the spacebar
to begin a trial, each word appeared one at a time in the center of the screen for a
fixed amount of time that depended on its length (i.e., 300ms plus 16.667ms for
each character), with an interword interval of 150ms (cf. Gernsbacher, 1989). The
probe word appeared in place of the next word after the interword interval
preceding its position. The probewordswere presented in all capital letters slightly
higher on the screen than the to-be-read text and remained on the screen until the
subject responded either yes or no that the word had appeared in the passage
currently being read, at which point the remaining words in a passage were
presented. At the end of each trial, subjects responded to a comprehension
statement. As in Experiment 1, subjects were instructed to read the texts as they
normally would for comprehension and to respond to the probe words as quickly
and accurately as possible. The experiment lasted 30 to 45 minutes.
Results
Data Exclusion and General Analytic Considerations
In Experiment 2, outliers and data exclusion were handled in the same manner as
in Experiment 1. The data from 10 subjects were excluded from further analysis
due to having fewer than 75% usable (i.e., accurate and non-outlying) probe
responses on experimental items (n ¼ 2), having probe accuracy of less than 75%
(n ¼ 4), or having comprehension accuracy of less than 75% on comprehension
questions (n ¼ 4). There remained data from 60 subjects after these exclusions.
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For these subjects, 9.0% of probe reaction times were excluded from further
analysis as outliers.
Comprehension Statements
Overall comprehension for experimental items across all conditions and subjects
was 88.5%. Unlike in Experiment 1, there was substantial variability across
conditions, ranging from a low of 85.0% in the P2 delay condition for negated
nouns to a high of 93% in the P3 delay condition for non-negated nouns. A 2
(noun type: negated, non-negated) £ 3 (probe position: P1, P2, P3) repeated-
measures ANOVA revealed that the effect of noun was significant, F1(1,
59) ¼ 10.86, p ¼ .002, F2(1, 41) ¼ 8.69, p ¼ .005, h2p ¼ .16, with better
comprehension when the first noun was non-negated (M ¼ 91.0%, SE ¼ 0.9%)
than when it was negated (M ¼ 85.9%, SE ¼ 1.2%). There was no significant
effect of delay nor a significant interaction between the two factors (all F , 2.2,
p . .12). A likely explanation for the effect of which noun was negated is that
sentences with a negated noun in the first position of a conjoined direct object are
slightly awkward (e.g., Every Friday Tina prepared not a lecture but only an
activity for her students) compared with when the same information is conveyed
with the negated noun in the second position (e.g., Every Friday Tina prepared
an activity but not a lecture for her students), possibly leading to slightly lower
comprehension. Moreover, there is no apparent relation between the
comprehension data and the reaction-time data (see below).
Recognition Probes
Reaction time. Reaction time means as a function of type of noun probed
(negated vs. non-negated) and probe position (P1, P2, P3) appear in Figure 3.
Overall, responses to negated nouns were longer than to non-negated nouns, and
this effect was largest at P1 and radically reduced at P2 and P3. A 2 (noun type)
£ 3 (probe position) repeated-measures ANOVA on reaction time means showed
that this negation effect was significant in the subjects analysis, F1(1, 59) ¼ 8.53,
p ¼ .005, and nearly so in the items analysis, F2(1, 41) ¼ 3.65, p ¼ .06,
h2p ¼ .13, although the interaction was not significant, F1(2, 118) ¼ 1.98,
p ¼ .14, F2(2, 82) ¼ 2.61, p ¼ .08, h2p ¼ .03. Planned paired-samples t-tests
showed that the negation effect was significant at P1, t1(59) ¼ 3.45, p ¼ .001,
t2(41) ¼ 3.17, p ¼ .003, d ¼ .44, but not at P2 or P3 (all p . .33). The effect of
probe position was not significant, both F , 1.4. A post-hoc analysis of reaction
times to negated nouns only at P1 versus P2 and P3 combined showed the
decrease in reaction times at the later positions was not quite significant,
t1(59) ¼ 1.36, p ¼ .18, t2(41) ¼ 1.69, p ¼ .10, d ¼ .18. A more-focused post-hoc
2 (noun type) £ 2 (P1 vs. P2 and P3 combined) interaction contrast was
significant at an unadjusted alpha level of .05, F1(1, 59) ¼ 3.96, p ¼ .05, F2(1,
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41) ¼ 10.05, p ¼ .003, h2p ¼ .06, consistent with the claim that activation levels
for negated and non-negated nouns were going in opposite directions.
Accuracy. Overall probe accuracy as a function of type of noun probed
(negated vs. non-negated) and probe position (P1, P2, P3) appear in Table 4.
Despite that accuracy was in general very high, a 2 (noun type) £ 3 (probe
position) repeated-measures ANOVA revealed that accuracy was higher for non-
negated than for negated nouns, F1(1, 59) ¼ 8.23, p ¼ .008, F2(1, 41) ¼ 7.59,
p ¼ .009, h2p ¼ .12, and that there were significant differences among the probe
positions, F1(2, 118) ¼ 4.79, p ¼ .01, F2(1, 82) ¼ 4.95, p ¼ .01, h2p ¼ .08, with
probes in P1 having the highest accuracy. These two factors did not interact
significantly, both F , 1.4.
Discussion
Experiment 2 replicated the results of Experiment 1: The negation effect was
present at P1, which corresponds to the 0-ms delay in Experiment 1. At this point,
FIGURE 3 Mean correct-probe reaction times for negated and non-negated concepts by probe
position in Experiment 2. Error bars represent ^1 SE (cf. Loftus & Masson, 1994).
TABLE 4
Mean Percent Correct (Standard Error) on Recognition Probes as a Function
of Condition in Experiment 2
Probe Position
Noun Type P1 P2 P3 Noun-Type Means
Negated 97.1 (0.7) 93.3 (1.2) 92.6 (1.3) 94.4 (0.6)
Non-negated 97.4 (0.8) 96.0 (1.0) 96.0 (1.1) 96.4 (0.6)
Probe-position means 97.3 (0.6) 94.6 (0.8) 94.3 (0.9)
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immediately after the first sentence, the negated concept was responded to more
slowly than the non-negated concept, suggesting that the negated concept was
less active. Consistent with Experiment 1, this negation effect was not present at
P2 or P3, which correspond to the 500- and 1,000-ms delays in Experiment 1,
respectively. Although the negated concepts tended to be responded to slightly
slower than non-negated concepts, the difference between the two was
nonsignificant at both positions, suggesting the activation levels of the negated
and non-negated concepts were roughly equal. In addition, Experiment 2
extended the results of Experiment 1: When the activation level of concepts was
measured during comprehension, there was not a significant difference in the
mean reaction time across positions, as was found across delays in Experiment 1.
This finding is consistent with the attention-allocation explanation advanced for
Experiment 1, which predicts no differences in Experiment 2 because
comprehension processes were always ongoing when the probe task was
presented, leading to roughly the same amount of attention allotted to the probe
task at different probe positions. However, the decline in probe accuracy across
probe position is slightly problematic for this argument, because it suggests some
changes still occur across time.
Given that the reaction times across probe positions are more comparable in
Experiment 2, we argue that the activation level of negated and non-negated
concepts appear to be moving in opposite directions as time went on, with
negated concepts becoming more active and non-negated concepts becoming less
active. Although the change in reaction time from P1 to P3 was not quite
significant for either the negated or non-negated concepts, the trend is consistent
with the hypothesis that, at some point, processing beings to shift from the
sentence’s assertions to the presuppositions. The post-hoc interaction test is
consistent with this claim. The shift from assertion to presupposition processing
shifts attention away from the non-negated concept and toward the negated
concept, resulting in the observed changes in activation.
EXPERIMENT 3
The results of Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the negation effect (MacDonald
& Just, 1989) is short-lived. Immediately after reading a sentence containing a
negation, recognition times to words that were negated were longer than for the
same words in the same sentence position when they had not been negated.
Shortly after this, on the order of a few hundred milliseconds, the negation effect
was reduced in size. Further, to some extent the results of Experiment 2 suggest
that the activation level of the negated concept was increasing as time passed.
This latter finding is consistent with the hypothesis that when a reader processes a
sentence with a negation in isolation, the sentence’s assertions, which are readily
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available by virtue of being what is explicitly stated, are processed first. After this
assertion processing has completed, or after it has begun, attention turns to a
sentence’s presuppositions. This shift in attention is our favored explanation for
the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 (cf. Levine & Hagaman, 2008). The
implication of this hypothesis is that if a sentence with a negation is presented in a
context that provides a presupposition to be denied or otherwise provides some
presupposition that can be readily integrated with the later negation (i.e., the
negation is licensed), processing of the presuppositions should be relatively easy
and should therefore have little effect on the activation level of the negated
concept. However, when a presupposition is not readily available, more
processing is required to generate a presupposition, and this increase in the
amount of processing should lead to an increase in the activation level of the
negated concept. We designed Experiment 3 to test this hypothesis by presenting
subjects with sentences that contain negation preceded by either licensing context
or by no context at all.
We manipulated licensing of negations like those seen in Experiments 1 and 2
(e.g., Every Friday Tina prepared a lecture but not an activity for her students) by
preceding them with a context sentence that provided a reason why the negated
entity was not (cf. Moxey & Sanford, 1986) created, obtained, and so on (e.g.,
When she had time, Tina liked to give her students something fun to do) or no
context at all. Following a sentence that did not provide a reason why the negated
entity was mentioned, the negated entity was rementioned (e.g., Preparing an
activity for her students . . . ) and reading time was measured on the part of the
sentence that included the second mention (for a full sample passage see Table 5).
When the negation is unlicensed, the results of Experiments 1 and 2, as well as
the pragmatic-inference hypothesis (Levine & Hagaman, 2008), predict that
subjects should be focused on the negated entity and inferring a presupposition to
deny; when the rementioned negated entity is encountered, it should be easily
accessible and thus easy to process, relative to a no-negation condition, leading to
little or no difference in reading time. By contrast, when the negation is licensed,
the subjects do not need to infer a presupposition to deny, and so there should be
no special processing effort focused on the negation; thus, when the rementioned
negated entity is encountered, it should be less accessible and thus difficult to
process, relative to a no-negation condition, leading to longer reading times. We
chose to measure reading time on the negated entity rather than to use a probe
task at a very long delay (i.e., more than a full sentence after the negation). Probe
tasks appear to be sensitive to differences in the activation of a concept only for a
brief period of time. For example, although Potts, Keenan, and Golding (1988)
found no evidence that readers made predictions about what would happen next
in a story, Murray, Klin, andMyers (1993) and Keefe andMcDaniel (1993) found
evidence that readers made predictions when the probe task was moved closer to
when the prediction would be made.
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Methods
Subjects
Sixty-eight students enrolled in a general psychology course at the University of
Arkansas participated in the experiment to partially fulfill a research requirement.
All subjects were native-English speakers.
Materials and Design
Thirty-two experimental passages were adapted from the materials from
Experiments 1 and 2 such that they appeared in one of four conditions (Table 5).
Each passage began with a context sentence that provided a reason why something
might not occur (e.g., insufficient time, money, space, energy, ability, etc.), thus
licensing the potential negation later in the passage. This sentence was presented to
subjects in the licensing condition but was not presented in the nonlicensing
condition. Next came a sentence that presented the target concept with or without
negation (e.g., a lecture but not an activity vs. a lecture and an activity). This was
followed by a sentence that was unrelated to the target concept. The last sentence of
eachpassage rementioned the target concept. In the negation condition, this sentence
provided a reasonwhy the target concept was not created, obtained, and so on, and in
the no negation condition, the sentence provided a reason why. Furthermore, each
sentence was divided into two halves to increase the specificity of the reading time
measure, resulting in eight sentence segments for each passage. Crucially, the target
phrase (i.e., with the rementioned negation) did not provide the reason why not; as a
result, reading time was measured only on reprocessing the negated concept plus a
prepositional phrase that was not related to the licensing proposition.
TABLE 5
Sample Experimental Passage From Experiment 3
Licensed negation
When she had time, Tina liked to give / her students something fun to do. Every Friday Tina
prepared / a lecture but not an activity for her students. She enjoyed / being a teacher.
Preparing an activity for her students / would have to wait till she had more time.
Licensed no negation
When she had time, Tina liked to give / her students something fun to do. Every Friday Tina
prepared / a lecture and an activity for her students. She enjoyed / being a teacher. Preparing an
activity for her students / made them much happier.
Unlicensed negation
Every Friday Tina prepared / a lecture but not an activity for her students. She enjoyed / being a
teacher. Preparing an activity for her students / would have to wait till she had more time.
Unlicensed no negation
Every Friday Tina prepared / a lecture and an activity for her students. She enjoyed / being a
teacher. Preparing an activity for her students / made them much happier.
Note. / indicates the points at which the sentences were split.
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In addition, there were 58 filler passages that varied from the experimental
passages on a number of dimensions to help mask the experimental
manipulations. Each experimental and filler passage had a comprehension
statement (e.g., Tina is a teacher), half of which required a “yes” and half of
which required a “no” response. Subjects saw each experimental passage in one
of the four conditions, along with all fillers. Four counterbalanced lists of
experimental sentences were created such that a quarter of the passages occurred
in each condition. The manipulation of the factors of theoretical interest in the
experiment resulted in a 2 (context: licensed, nonlicensed) £ 2 (negation:
negated, non-negated) completely within-subjects design.
Procedure
The procedure was similar to Experiment 1 except that each sentence was
divided into two segments and the probe recognition task was removed. The
experimental session consisted of 90 total trials (32 experimental and 58 filler) in
two blocks of 45 trials each. The order of the blocks, as well as the order of the trials
within blocks, was randomized, and subjects were instructed to read the sentences
as they normallywould for comprehension. The experiment lasted 30 to45minutes.
Results
Data Exclusion and General Analytic Considerations
For each subject, all target phrase reading times greater than 4,000ms and less
than 600ms were classified as outliers. The data from five subjects were excluded
from further analysis due to having more than 10% of reading times on
experimental trials classified as outliers. For the remaining 63 subjects, 2.3% of
reading times were excluded from further analysis as outliers.
Comprehension Statements
One ambiguous item was excluded from analysis. Overall comprehension for the
remaining experimental items across all conditions and subjects was 84%. There
was little variability across conditions, ranging from a low of 82.4% in the
unlicensed condition when the target concept was non-negated to a high of 87.1%
in the licensing condition when the target concept was negated. A 2 (context:
licensed, nonlicensed) £ 2 (negation: negated, non-negated) repeated-measures
ANOVA revealed no significant effects (all F , 2.5).
Target Phrase Reading Times
Reading timemeans as a function of context (licensed vs. nonlicensed) and negation
(negated vs. non-negated) appear in Figure 4. Overall, reading times were faster
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when the target concept had been non-negated than when it had been negated;
however, this pattern appeared to differ across context conditions. A 2 (context:
licensed, nonlicensed) £ 2 (negation: negated, non-negated) repeated-measures
ANOVA showed that the main effect of context was not significant, F1(1,
62) , .001,p ¼ .995,F2(1, 31) ¼ .001,p ¼ .97.Therewas a significantmain effect
of negation, F1(1, 62) ¼ 9.00, p ¼ .004, F2(1, 31) ¼ 11.15, p ¼ .002, h2p ¼ .127,
with faster reading times in the non-negated condition. The interaction between
licensing and negationwas not reliable,F1(1, 62) ¼ 1.84, p ¼ .18,F2(1, 31) ¼ 0.89,
p ¼ .35. However, given the theoretical predictions, we carried out planned paired-
samples t-tests within each licensing condition. The first revealed, as predicted, a
significant negation effect in the licensing condition, t1(62) ¼ 3.30, p ¼ .002,
t2(31) ¼ 3.19, p ¼ .003, d ¼ 0.42, with faster reading times in the non-negated
condition. The second comparison revealed that the negation effect was more than
50% smaller and nonsignificant in the nonlicensing condition, t1(62) ¼ 1.38,
p ¼ .17, t2(31) ¼ 1.18, p ¼ .25, d ¼ 0.17. These two findings provide support for
the hypothesis that licensing influences the activation level of negated concepts.
Discussion
Experiment 3 compared the activation of negated concepts—via ease of
reading—in licensing and nonlicensing contexts, providing evidence for a
negation effect when the negation was licensed but a much weaker effect when it
was unlicensed. The latter result provides converging evidence for the conclusion
in Experiments 1 and 2 that the negation effect is not present for more than a brief
time when the negation is unlicensed (i.e., in a null context), using a reading time
measure instead of a probe word task. The negation effect seen when the negation
was licensed suggests that when the negated concept is readily integrated with the
FIGURE 4 Mean reading times for negated and non-negated concepts by context in Experiment 3.
Error bars represent ^1 SE (cf. Loftus & Masson, 1994).
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prior discourse, the concept is less active and harder to process when it is
encountered later.
The lack of a significant negation effect seen when the negation was unlicensed
suggests that readers keep the negated concept fairly active, making it easier to
process when it is encountered later. Negating a concept without contextual
justification brings attention to the negated concept rather than leading to its
suppression (cf. Giora, Balaban, Fein, & Alkabets, 2005). Additionally, it is worth
noting that the licensing contexts in this experiment were relatively weak. Our
licensing contexts provided information that could be used to explain why the
negation occurred (e.g., Tina did not have enough time). Rather than providing a
presupposition to be denied, this licensing simply made it easier for subjects to
integrate the negation byproviding a reasonwhynot (cf.Moxey, 2006). It is possible
that a different licensing context would lead to an even lower level of activation for
negated concepts, which might result in an even greater difference in the activation
level of negated and non-negated concepts within the licensing condition.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
These three experiments provide converging evidence that when negation is
unlicensed, attention is initially shifted away from the negated concepts but is
then refocused on the negated concepts during subsequent presupposition
processing. All three experiments show the negation effect is minimal (if it exists
at all) after about 500ms of the end of a sentence containing unlicensed negation.
Once the comprehender becomes aware of the missing presupposition and begins
to construct it, the negated concept returns to an active state. Unlicensed negation
leads to a negation effect that is apparently short-lived, whereas licensed negation
leads to a prolonged negation effect.
The scope of the pragmatic inference hypothesis as proposed by Levine and
Hagaman (2008) was limited to unlicensed negation, with the central claim being
that the use of unlicensed negation required inferring a presupposition to cancel
or deny. However, implicit in this claim is that licensed negation does not require
a presupposition to be inferred. Because the reactivation of the negated concepts
is assumed to be caused by presupposition processing, it should only occur when
the negation is unlicensed, and licensed negation should therefore lead to a
prolonged negation effect. As previously discussed, this effect of licensing was
demonstrated by Autry and Levine (2012) using an offline measure. The reading
time results of Experiment 3 provide online evidence that a prolonged negation
effect is seen with licensed negation.
It may seem counterintuitive that negation would increase the activation level
of a concept; however, maintaining a high level of activation might be not a
failure but rather a feature of unlicensed negation. Speakers may (and do)
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intentionally produce unlicensed negation to indirectly focus on an idea (Giora,
2007; Giora et al., 2005). This may be particularly useful in situations where the
idea being introduced is undesirable. For example, a politician might make a
statement such as “I do not support an increase in taxes.” If this negation is
unlicensed, that is, if this statement is not an expected response to a question or
something similar, then it raises the question of why the politician made the
statement at all. It might suggest that some other person does support an increase
in taxes. In the political arena, that other person is likely the politician’s
opponent. In this way, the politician is able to remind listeners of a negative
feature of another candidate without appearing to be attacking them.
Because of the importance of timing in the present experiments, it is worth
considering different patterns of results involving unlicensed negation and the
subsequent representation of negated concepts. One noteworthy finding is from
Hasson and Glucksberg (2006), who presented subjects with negative metaphors
in isolation (e.g., This kindergarten isn’t a zoo), each of which was followed at
different delays (i.e., 150, 500, or 1,000ms after reading) by a lexical-decision
probe word consistent with the positive (e.g., noisy) or negative (e.g., calm)
version of the metaphor. There were two critical findings. At the two earliest
delays, the positive (i.e., incorrect) interpretation of the metaphor was facilitated,
whereas the negative (i.e., correct) interpretation of the metaphor was not.
However, at the long delay, the correct, negative interpretation of the metaphor
was facilitated and the incorrect, positive interpretation was no longer facilitated.
Hasson and Glucksberg argued that negative metaphors were first understood as
affirmative metaphors (i.e., counterfactually) and only after this occurred was the
negative information integrated into the understanding of the metaphor.
Kaup and her colleagues reported a similar set of findings with respect to the
comprehension of negative sentences like The bird is not in the air. Shortly (i.e.,
250ms) after reading negatives sentence like these, subjects were faster to verify
that a picture of a bird with outstretched wings was a bird than they were to verify
a picture of a bird perched in a tree (Kaup, Yaxley, Madden, Zwaan, & Ludtke,
2007). The same was true when the verification task occurred 750ms after the
negative sentence, but the pattern reversed 1,500ms after reading (Kaup, Ludtke,
& Zwaan, 2006). Kaup, Zwaan, and Ludtke (2007) argued for a two-step
simulation hypothesis in which the counterfactual (i.e., positive, incorrect) state
of affairs is represented first and is replaced by the factual (i.e., negative, correct)
state of affairs. Thus, the results of Hasson and Glucksberg and Kaup and her
colleagues suggest the presupposed state of affairs is first represented and is
followed by a denial or cancellation of this presupposed state of affairs. This is
consistent with the pragmatic inference hypothesis insofar that both what is
asserted and, in particular, what is presupposed and denied must be processed, but
it is not consistent with the argument we have made that assertion processing
precedes presupposition processing.
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Oneway to accommodate the finding that sometimes presupposition processing
precedes assertion processing and sometime the reverse occurs is to posit that both
are processed in parallel, and the one that finishes first will depend on the relative
ease of processing. In the case of a simple negative sentence like The bird is not in
the air, one probable presupposition is the question Is there a bird in the air? (cf.
Tian et al., 2010), but the assertion is vague (e.g., the bird could be on the ground, in
a cage, underwater, etc.) and therefore more difficult to construct. In the case of a
negative metaphor like The kindergarten isn’t a zoo, there may be a prior
expectation that the kindergarten is not quiet. Hasson and Glucksberg (2006)
reported that the positive versions of their metaphors were slightly more familiar
and sensible than the negative versions, further suggesting the presupposition was
easy to infer. In the case of relatively complex negatives like ours and those of
MacDonald and Just (1989) (e.g., Elizabeth bakes bread but no cookies), the
simple questionDid Elizabeth bake cookies? does not serve to fully contextualize
the negation. Thus, we suggest that complex negation may lead to more-complex
presuppositions, leading in turn to assertion processing running to completion first.
Moreover, in the case of negative metaphors and simple negatives like not in the
air, clear opposite meanings are readily available, and there is some evidence that
so-called bipolar negatives are processed differently from non-bipolar negatives
(Mayo, Schul,&Burnstein, 2004).However, our suggestions about the role of ease
of presupposition processing and polarity of concepts in the representation and
processing of negation are speculative and in need of additional research.
The pragmatic inference hypothesis is also consistent with the claim that
deviation (e.g., confounding new and given information) from the typical
ordering or presentation of given and new information in a sentence (e.g., Chafe,
1976; Halliday, 1967; Prince, 1981; Ward & Birner, 2001) will require the
recipient of the information to perform additional processing to understand how
the anomalous information fits into the ongoing discourse representation. That is,
atypicality in information structure leads to the need to understand why there is
an atypicality. Haviland and Clark’s (1974) given-new strategy was developed to
explain what comprehenders did when new information was presented in a
location (e.g., early in a sentence) or manner (e.g., when introduced with a
definite article or by certain adverbs like still) that was typically used to present
given information. They found evidence that a bridging inference must be made
to preserve the given-new structure of a sentence to connect it properly to the
prior discourse. We are arguing that the given-new strategy is a specific instance
of the type of processing posited by the pragmatic inference hypothesis.
Comprehenders not only do additional processing when new information is
presented where given information was expected, but anomalous presentation of
information that depends on a presupposition that is not present (e.g., unlicensed
negation)—that is, when given information is provided where new information is
expected—similarly leads to additional processing.
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A limitation of the Experiments 1 and 2was the use of a probe recognition task to
measure the activation of negated concepts. This methodology was selected to be
consistent with MacDonald and Just (1989), but it is potentially problematic for the
study of negation because responding “yes” to a word that was present in a sentence
is in conflict with the representation of a negated concept as “no X”. Especially
because probe-word tasks that require a binary decision encourage backward
integration or compatibility- or context-checking (Potts et al. 1988), this should
make itmore difficult to respond “yes” to negated concepts, slowing overall reaction
times (Neill, Valdes, Terry, & Gorfein, 1992). The reaction times recorded from
probe recognition tasks may therefore reflect more than just the activation of the
concept.However, the absolute activation level of the concepts is not the focus of the
present experiments because it can be affected by many different factors (e.g.,
baseline activation, familiarity, repetition, semantic relatedness, etc.). Instead, this
research is primarily concernedwith changes in activation over time (i.e., the change
in the negation effect from0 to 1,000ms) and by focusing on the relative differences
in activation, the reaction time inflation that occurs due to the response conflict is less
problematic for the interpretation of the present results. It is still possible that the
interference caused by the response conflict decreases over time (McKoon &
Ratcliff, 1989), resulting in faster responses to negated concepts and therefore a
smaller negation effect as time goes on; however, there is evidence that this type of
interference is fairly long-lived (Grison, Tipper, & Hewitt, 2005), which argues
against this alternative explanation. Nevertheless, future research that provides
converging evidence from a probe task that does not require a binary decision (e.g.,
naming) would help alleviate these concerns.
One other concern related to the probe task in Experiments 1 and 2 is that these
tasksmay encourage alternative strategies, such as simply tracking thewords in the
sentences without comprehending the sentence (Gordon, Hendrick, & Ledoux
Foster, 2000). It is possible that subjects may not have been using normal
comprehension processes, which would limit the generalizability of the findings.
However, most sentences the subjects read in both experiments were fillers that
were explicitly designed to confound any memory-based (rather than
comprehension-based) strategy the subjects might adopt (cf. Wiley, Mason, &
Myers, 2001). Moreover, comprehension questions were used to ensure that
subjects were focused on comprehension, and the overall high comprehension
suggests that subjects did not opt out of comprehension. Future research using
alternativemethods ofmeasuring the activation of negated concepts (e.g., naming,
ERPs) is necessary to determine whether the present results were a valid measure
of negated concepts’ activation or if they were an artifact of the probe recognition
task. However, the concerns associated with the use of the recognition probe task
should be tempered by the converging evidence found in Experiment 3’s reading
times, which are unaffected by response conflict or memory-based strategies.
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Conclusion
In three experiments, unlicensed negated concepts were less active than non-
negated concepts only when measured immediately after the sentence where the
negation occurred. Although the negated concepts were initially less active,
additional processing time allowed the reactivation of the negated concepts such
that the activation of negated and non-negated concepts was not significantly
different. This occurred when the negation was unlicensed but not when it was
licensed. These findings demonstrate that when negation is unlicensed, the
negation effect is very brief. For anything but the most immediate processing,
unlicensed negated concepts are therefore highly active and accessible.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Experiment 1 was part of a master’s thesis conducted at the University of
Arkansas by KSA under the direction of WHL.
Portions of these data were presented at the 24th Annual CUNY Sentence
Processing Conference, Stanford, CA, March 24–26, 2011, and at the 16th
Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing,
York, UK, September 6–8, 2010.
We thank Ally Burton, Lukas Chupp, Audrey Dunn, Katherine Hutchins,
Alicia Small, Erica Tadlock, Marissa Tyson, and Austin Whitesell for their
assistance with stimulus preparation and data collection and Joel Hagaman for his
comments on an early draft of this article. Maryellen MacDonald, Mante
Nieuwland, and two anonymous reviewers provided constructive criticism on
prior versions of the manuscript.
FUNDING
Support for this research was provided by National Science Foundation Grant
BCS-0617419 to WHL.
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