Eye-movements and ERPs reveal the time course of processing negation and remitting counterfactual worlds

Abstract

The ability to update our current knowledge using contextual information is a vital process during every-day language comprehension. To understand a negated statement, readers are required to cancel real-world expectations, but are not explicitly provided with an alternative model. Thus, the question of how and when a negative context influences interpretation of later events arises. We report one eye-movement study (Exp.1) and one ERP study (Exp. 2) investigating the effects of negation on discourse processing. Prior context depicted a real-world (RW), or negated-world (NW), while a second sentence was manipulated to create RW anomalous continuations, where events included a violation of RW knowledge, and RW congruent continuations, where the events described were congruent with RW knowledge. Results from Experiment 1 showed that the negated discourse context did not influence initial processing of the target sentence, as reflected in participants' eye movement behaviour. Similarly, Experiment 2 revealed that the typical N400 effect to semantic violations has not been reversed by introducing a negated-world context. However, in later processing, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the negated-world context is eventually incorporated into the representation of the sentence meaning. Thus, we suggest that discourse does not always have an immediate effect on language comprehension and discuss the results in terms of a variety of accounts of representing negation. Section: Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience

If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension

“…showed that sentences describing implausible real-world events (e.g., ''Families would feed their cat a bowl of carrots'') incurred temporary disruptions during sentence reading, as indexed by longer early fixations in eye-tracking, despite a counterfactual context (e.g., ''If cats were vegetarians''; see Ferguson, Scheepers, & Sanford, 2010, for evidence from visual world eye-tracking). Ferguson, Sanford, and Leuthold (2008) replicated this result with negated counterfactuals (e.g., ''If cats were not carnivores. .…”

Expectations in counterfactual and theory of mind reasoning

“…However, as has been demonstrated by several studies of negation (e.g. Ferguson, Sanford & Leuthold, 2008;Kaup, LŸdtke & Zwaan, 2006), representing a negative situation is frequently more difficult to process and is therefore subject to a processing delay (but cf. Nieuwland & Kuperberg, in press), which may explain why affirmative antecedent continuations are the preferred choice with the stimuli used here.…”

“If a lion could speak …”: Online sensitivity to propositional truth-value of unrealistic counterfactual sentences

“…Ferguson, Sanford, and Leuthold (2008) reported that early processing disruptions as indexed by increased first-pass reading times but not in later measures coincided with an increased N400. This is consistent with observations that first fixation durations are correlated with N400 amplitude and that these measures are sensitive to the same lexical and sentence variables (e.g., Dambacher & Kliegl, 2007;see Dimigen, Sommer, Hohlfeld, Jacobs, & Kliegl, 2011, for in-depth discussion).…”