A Verbal Illusion: Now in Three Languages

Kizach, Johannes; Christensen, Ken Ramshøj; Weed, Ethan

doi:10.1007/s10936-015-9370-6

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…This process would be modulated by approach and avoidance content of sentences. Previous research has supported that sentences that contain negatives are more difficult to process than affirmative ones [24,25,4,8,26,27] and sentences become increasingly difficult to process the more (explicit or implicit) negations they contain [28,29,17,30]. As mentioned, representation of avoidance as "no-approach" might involve an implicit negation.…”

Section: Interaction Between Negation and Direction In Action-sentencmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

et al. 2020

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Linguistic negation acts by inhibiting the representation of information under its scope, often leading to the representation of positive alternative states of affairs. Motivational direction refers to approach/avoidance intentionality in our interactions with environmental stimuli expressed by means of verbs (e.g., "accept" vs "reject"). We consider it plausible that negation interacts with direction to represent the true motivation of the protagonist in sentence understanding (e.g., if an approach action is negated it is represented as avoidance). In the first study, we examine this interaction offline by asking participants to judge approach or avoidance meaning of affirmative (e.g., "he/she included/excluded meat") and negative sentences ("he/she did not include/exclude meat"). Results support that negation reversed participants' interpretation of sentence motivational direction. In a further study, we carried out two probe recognition experiments to examine the interaction during sentence comprehension; in both, the critical probe was the word referring to the target of the action (e.g., "meat"). In the first experiment, participants had to recognize the probe word presented 1500 milliseconds after sentence offset, while for the second one, the delay was 500 milliseconds. Results showed that at 1500 ms, target recognition took significantly more time for negated avoidance sentences than for the other conditions. Therefore, representing negated avoidance sentences seems to imply more complex processing, as avoidance verbs would be implicitly negative. By contrast, at the 500 ms delay, negation impaired target recognition for both approach and avoidance sentences, suggesting an unspecific inhibitory effect of negation at that sentence processing stage. Implication of these results for both research on negation and in action understanding are discussed.

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Section: Interaction Between Negation and Direction In Action-sentencmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

et al. 2020

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“…If someone were to maintain that it is a perfectly fi ne structure with a single interpretation, say, 'more women than men', and hence not a grammatical illusion, then they would clearly be ignoring the judgments of the remaining 299 speakers who disagree in this survey. In my opinion, this only underlines the strength of the illusion and again point to the similar robustness of effect of the depth charge construction in (17) (Kizach, Christensen & Weed 2015). In summary, the illusory well-formedness of comparative illusions is very robust.…”

mentioning

confidence: 54%

“…In this respect a comparative illusion is similar to the so-called depth charge sentence in (17) which people consistently misinterpret to mean exactly the opposite of what it actually means (Kizach, Christensen & Weed 2015;Natsopoulos 1985;Wason & Reich 1979); compare (17) and (18), which by most speakers are give the same interpretation:…”

Section: The Dead Ends Of Languagementioning

confidence: 86%

“…The problem with (17) is that it is overly complex; for one thing, it involves no less than three types of negation, in addition to a semantic anomaly and a pragmatic violation; for details and a recent 'deconstruction' of the depth charge construction, see Kizach, Christensen & Weed (2015). Though the comparative illusion is crucially different, both comparative illusions and depth charges yield consistent but wrong interpretations, depth charges only one, comparative illusions (at least) three (plus the fact that comparative illusions are meaningless or absurd).…”

Section: The Dead Ends Of Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

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Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

Vikner¹,

Jørgensen²,

Gelderen³

2016

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“…In general, there were some differences between the strong and the preselected weak pragmatic sentences correct and incorrect parsing and at the same time, differences were found in the belief strength that Greek participants reported in the current study and in Natsopoulos's study (1985). Future research should try to replicate the same experiments for this verbal illusion in more languages and in larger samples (Kizach, Christensen, & Weed, 2016). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

A Verbal Illusion Reexamined

Giannouli¹

2016

Acta Neuropsychologica

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SUMMARYThe so-called depth charge sentences, as is the case with the famous sentence 'no head injury is too trivial to be ignored,' have been investigated in the past in a series of experiments. The aim of this study is to re-examine the verbal illusion that is associated with the understanding of some semantically and syntactically strange sentences, and to replicate Natsopoulos's (1985) classic research within the mo dern Greek native speaking population. Three experiments were conducted in the Greek language with the use of variations of sentences that are claimed to create a misunderstanding in their interpretation. In total, one hundred and fifty-one native Greek speaking participants with no specific education in psycholinguistics were examined with a series of sentences.Results from the three current experiments revealed that there were some differences in the performance of the current Greek participants when compared to the performance of a similar sample of Greek native speakers thirty years ago regarding the different verbal variations of several anomalous sentences. Additionally, there were some differences in the English and Greek languages, but there was a strong verbal illusion regardless of the experimental manipulation in all of the reported studies. Although there is a differentiation in performance for this verbal phenomenon across the participants' samples, future research should further investigate the cognitive and emotional factors that may contribute to the stable existence of this verbal illusion.

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A Verbal Illusion: Now in Three Languages

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood

A Verbal Illusion Reexamined

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