Event-related potentials to visual processing of incongruities in negated and affirmative sentences

• In spite of the fact that negation has been the focus of many studies, the way it is processed in human communication still eludes us. Previous studies of negation using event-related potentials (ERPs) have reported inconclusive results as to whether or not negation poses a difficultiesy for processing. While some have found that negation was initially is ignored and incongruities in negated sentences did do not modulate the N400 effect (Fischler et al., 1983; Lüdtke et al., 2008), others have found that the N400 was is modulated in incongruent negated sentences similarly to affirmative sentences (Nieuwland & Kuperberg, 2008). Moreover, Tthis research, however, has been limited to sentential negators, such as not and no while other forms, such as prefixally negated forms with un are largely unexplored despite their frequency of use (Tottie, 1980). To remedy this, tTwo questions are at the core, namely whether 1) there is a difficulty in the processing of negation as measured by ERPs, and 2) prefixally negated forms are processed similarly to sententially negated forms or to affirmative forms.In order to answer these questions, the processing of sentences with affirmative (authorized), prefixally negated (unauthorized) and sententially negated (not authorized) forms adjectives was investigated in sentential contextsces, such as The details in the new Obama biography were correct/wrong because the book was authorized/unauthorized/not authorized by the White House. In each sentence, aA member of an opposite pair (underlined) in the first part of the sentence in combinationwas combined with the a negated or affirmative adjective (bold; critical word) in the second part creatinged a semantically congruent or incongruent context. The amplitudes of the ERP effects, N400 (300-500 ms) and the P600 (500-700 ms), as well as accuracy rates and response times to sentences were recorded and analyzed using mixed-effects modelling. The behavioral results (analyseis of accuracy and response times) revealed suggested that sentential negation was more difficult to process than prefixal negation and affirmative forms. The ERP analyses were in line with the behavioralwere consistent with these results in that the most effortless processing was observed for affirmatives where incongruities elicited a larger N400, indicating a successful detection of the incongruities. Prefixal negation was more difficult than affirmative forms, resulting in a parietal N400 combined with a centro-parietal P600, indicating a re-evaluation of the content of the sentence. Sentential negation was seemed to be the most difficult form to process as the ERP effects of congruency were restricted to a P600, suggesting that incongruities in these sentences were processed differently to the other two conditions and were concentrated on re-evaluation processes.In line with previous research, we show conclude that sentential negation (not) is more difficult to process than affirmatives and prefixal negation (un). However, we do not find that not has been entirely ignored in processing. We present two novel findings: 1. Different mechanisms are involved in processing incongruities in negated sentences (P600) than in affirmative sentences (N400), 2. No differences are observed between prefixal negation and affirmative forms in the behavioral results but the ERP patterns indicate that the course of processing of these formsprefixal negation is more demanding than affirmative forms. 

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

English

negation

ERP

N400

P600

Engelska med språkvetenskaplig inriktning

English

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)