Informative use of "not" is N400-blind.
Bilge Palaz1, Ryan Rhodes2, Arild Hestvik1
1Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
Psychophysiology
|September 3, 2020
Summary
Negation processing in sentences is not always incremental. Even in meaningful contexts, the brain appears to process negation later, supporting non-incremental sentence interpretation models.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Sentence processing is typically incremental and predictive.
- Negation processing is hypothesized to be a non-incremental, two-step process.
- Event-related potential (ERP) studies often show a "negation-blind" N400 effect.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate if under-informative stimuli contribute to negation blindness in N400.
- Examine N400 responses to pragmatically licensed negation in class-exclusion statements.
- Determine if negation is processed non-incrementally even in meaningful contexts.
Main Methods:
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.
- Participants viewed simple class-exclusion statements (e.g., "A hammer is not a bird").
- Stimuli were designed to be more meaningful than in previous experiments.
Main Results:
- ERPs still exhibited a "negation-blind" N400 pattern.
- The N400 was not sensitive to the truth value of the negation.
- This occurred even when negation was pragmatically licensed and contextually meaningful.
Conclusions:
- Negation blindness persists even with pragmatically licensed and meaningful negation.
- Findings support late or non-incremental models of negation processing.
- The N400 effect suggests negation is integrated after core proposition meaning is established.
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