No abstract

We investigated the question of whether comprehenders mentally simulate a described situation even when this situation is explicitly negated in the sentence. In two experiments, participants read negative sentences such as There was no eagle in the sky, and subsequently responded to pictures of mentioned entities in the context of a recognition task. Participants' responses following negative sentences were faster when the depicted entity matched rather than mismatched the negated situation. These results suggest that comprehenders simulate the negated situation when processing a negated sentence. The results thereby provide further support for the experiential-simulations view of language comprehension.

In a sentence-picture verification paradigm, participants were presented in a rapid-serial-visual-presentation paradigm with affirmative or negative sentences (e.g., "In the front of the tower there is a/no ghost") followed by a matching or mismatching picture. Response latencies and event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured during reading and verification. An enhanced negative shift in the ERPs for the subject noun (i.e., "ghost") in negative, compared to affirmative sentences, was found during reading. We relate this ERP deflection to enhanced processing demands required by the negative particle no. Although this effect suggests a direct impact of negation on language processing, results for picture processing reveal that negation is not immediately integrated into sentence meaning. When the delay of picture presentation was short (250 msec), verification latencies and ERPs evoked by the picture showed a priming effect independent of whether the sentence contained a negation. Unprimed pictures (foreground object not mentioned in the sentence) led to longer latencies and higher N400 amplitudes than primed pictures (foreground object mentioned in the sentence). Main effects of negation showed up only in a late positive-going ERP effect. In contrast, when the delay was long (1500 msec), we observed main effects of truth value and negation in addition to the priming effect already in the N400 time window, that is, negation is fully integrated into sentence meaning only at a later point in the comprehension process. When negation has not yet been integrated, verification decisions appear to be modulated by additional time-consuming reanalysis processes.

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies.

Although poetry reception is often considered to be a highly emotional process, psychological research on emotional experiences when reading poetry is anything but abundant. Most research on poetry reception addresses the influence of poetic devices like meter and rhyme on readers’ comprehension, appreciation, and the recollection of the poem. Empathic reactions and emotional involvement as described, for example, in studies on reading narratives are rarely discussed. Here, we propose that poetry is predisposed to induce a variety of different kinds of affective responses and feelings. In particular, we put forward the mood empathy hypothesis, according to which poems expressing moods of persons, situations, or objects should engage readers to mentally simulate and affectively resonate with the depicted state of affairs. We report evidence that this resonance can lead to the experience of the depicted mood itself, or some feeling closely associated with it, a process similar to empathy as a kind of Einfühlung or feeling in. Our results are interpreted in the larger frame of the neurocognitive poetics model of literary reading (Jacobs, 2011, 2014). In line with the model’s postulate that backgrounding elements facilitate emotional involvement while foregrounding features promote aesthetic evaluation, we identified different predictors for both processes: familiarity and situational embedding were the main factors mediating mood empathy, and aesthetic liking was best predicted from foregrounding features like style and form. By supporting the mood empathy hypothesis, these findings open new perspectives for future studies on literary reading and poetics.

The vast majority of studies on affective processes in reading focus on single words. The most robust finding is a processing advantage for positively valenced words, which has been replicated in the rare studies investigating effects of affective features of words during sentence or story comprehension. Here we were interested in how the different valences of words in a sentence influence its processing and supralexical affective evaluation. Using a sentence verification task we investigated how comprehension of simple declarative sentences containing a noun and an adjective depends on the valences of both words. The results are in line with the assumed general processing advantage for positive words. We also observed a clear interaction effect, as can be expected from the affective priming literature: sentences with emotionally congruent words (e.g., The grandpa is clever) were verified faster than sentences containing emotionally incongruent words (e.g., The grandpa is lonely). The priming effect was most prominent for sentences with positive words suggesting that both, early processing as well as later meaning integration and situation model construction, is modulated by affective processing. In a second rating task we investigated how the emotion potential of supralexical units depends on word valence. The simplest hypothesis predicts that the supralexical affective structure is a linear combination of the valences of the nouns and adjectives (Bestgen, 1994). Overall, our results do not support this: The observed clear interaction effect on ratings indicate that especially negative adjectives dominated supralexical evaluation, i.e., a sort of negativity bias in sentence evaluation. Future models of sentence processing thus should take interactive affective effects into account.

Texts are often reread in everyday life, but most studies of rereading have been based on expository texts, not on literary ones such as poems, though literary texts may be reread more often than others. To correct this bias, the present study is based on two of Shakespeare's sonnets. Eye movements were recorded, as participants read a sonnet then read it again after a few minutes. After each reading, comprehension and appreciation were measured with the help of a questionnaire. In general, compared to the first reading, rereading improved the fluency of reading (shorter total reading times, shorter regression times, and lower fixation probability) and the depth of comprehension. Contrary to the other rereading studies using literary texts, no increase in appreciation was apparent. Moreover, results from a predictive modeling analysis showed that readers' eye movements were determined by the same critical psycholinguistic features throughout the two sessions. Apparently, even in the case of poetry, the eye movement control in reading is determined mainly by surface features of the text, unaffected by repetition.

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (Jacobs et al., 2017; Xue et al., 2017), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning- based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials (cf. Jacobs, 2015c).