The study investigates the way people use and make sense of negated adjectives. Past research showed that by using a negated adjective, instead of an available antonym, one is able to communicate a mitigated sense of that antonym. To illustrate, by saying 'not hot'one can communicate 'neither hot, but not quite cold'. This e¤ect has been termed the mitigation hypothesis. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the extent of mitigation should vary as a function of two factors. First, mitigation should be more pronounced for contraries (adjectives that lie on a continuum) than for contradictories (adjectives that form a dichotomy); Second, the extent of meaning mitigation of marked adjectives should be stronger than that of unmarked adjectives. Finally, we hypothesized that these two factors interact, so that the markedness e¤ect should be stronger for contraries than for contradictories. We report results from three experiments that tested these hypotheses with native speakers of Hebrew and discuss alternative mechanisms that might lead to mitigation of negated terms. We also address the practical importance of our findings for questionnaire design and communication. The meaning of negated adjectivesNegations are prevalent in communication. Mehl and Pennebaker (2003) analyzed natural conversations of students and found that negations were slightly more prevalent than words connoting positive emotions, two times more frequent than words connoting negative emotions, and almost three times more prevalent than words used to denote causality. This occurs in spite of findings which show that processing negations is often harder, slower, and more error-prone than processing a‰rmations (e.g.,
We show that using the point‐biserial as a discrimination index for distractors by differentiating between examinees who chose the distractor and examinees who did not choose the distractor is theoretically wrong and may lead to an incorrect rejection of items. We propose an alternative usage and present empirical evidence for its suitability.
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