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Abstract:People reject 'paradoxical' inferences, such as: Luisa didn't play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn't play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals should accept them if the conclusions refer only to possibilities consistent with the premises: Luisa didn't play soccer; therefore, if Luisa played a game then she didn't play soccer. Two experiments corroborated this prediction for three sorts of 'paradox', including a disjunctive paradox.

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Literature assumes that negation is more difficult to understand than affirmation, but this might depend on the pragmatic context. The goal of this paper is to show that pragmatic knowledge modulates the unfolding processing of negation due to the previous activation of the negated situation. To test this, we used the visual world paradigm. In this task, we presented affirmative (e.g., her dad was rich) and negative sentences (e.g., her dad was not poor) while viewing two images of the affirmed and denied entities. The critical sentence in each item was preceded by one of three types of contexts: an inconsistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had little savings) that activates the negated situation (a poor man), a consistent context (e.g., She supposed that her dad had enough savings) that activates the actual situation (a rich man), or a neutral context (e.g., her dad lived on the other side of town) that activates neither of the two models previously suggested. The results corroborated our hypothesis. Pragmatics is implicated in the unfolding processing of negation. We found an increase in fixations on the target compared to the baseline for negative sentences at 800 ms in the neutral context, 600 ms in the inconsistent context, and 1450 ms in the consistent context. Thus, when the negated situation has been previously introduced via an inconsistent context, negation is facilitated.

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Three experiments tracked participants’ eye-movements to examine the time course of comprehension of the dual meaning of counterfactuals, such as “if there had been oranges then there would have been pears.” Participants listened to conditionals while looking at images in the visual world paradigm, including an image of oranges and pears that corresponds to the counterfactual’s conjecture, and one of no oranges and no pears that corresponds to its presumed facts, to establish at what point in time they consider each one. The results revealed striking individual differences: some participants looked at the negative image and the affirmative one, and some only at the affirmative image. The first experiment showed that participants who looked at the negative image increased their fixation on it within half a second. The second experiment showed they do so even without explicit instructions, and the third showed they do so even for printed words.

There has been a substantial amount of research that has examined how context a¤ects people's understanding of negation. Many authors argue that negation is more plausible or natural in some contexts than in others. For these authors, it is reasonable to negate a proposition only when it is presupposed. However, this assumption has been indirectly inferred from comprehension studies. None of them checked if the frequency of the spontaneous use of negation depends on the context. In this paper we present two experiments on this topic. The participants read stories where a sentence is false; and were asked to produce a sentence that could be true. In the first experiment they produced more negations from multiple than from bipolar contexts (e.g., when the false sentence was ''the car was red'' as compared to ''the car was big''). In the second experiment the context was logically dichotomized by adding disjunctions. In this case, incongruent contexts enhanced the use of negation. The results seem to support the idea that when there is a clear alternative, negation is seldom spontaneously produced even if it denies a presupposition.