Negation and the N400: investigating temporal aspects of negation integration using semantic and world-knowledge violations

Dudschig, Carolin; Mackenzie, Ian Grant; Maienborn, Claudia; Kaup, Barbara; Leuthold, Hartmut

doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1535127

Cited by 28 publications

(73 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The classical N400 effect, which manifests in a larger negative amplitude for semantically incongruent sentences than for congruent sentences, reflects semantic processing 51 , 65 , 66 . This N400 effect has also been observed in response to sentences with world knowledge violations 47 – 50 , 67 – 69 . The amplitude of N400 is assumed to reflect the difficulty of integrating the coming word into the preceding context 52 – 54 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

“…Although the reading stimuli in the present study were written in Chinese, an ideographic language, this fact is not a limitation of the study. Specifically, previous studies have demonstrated that world knowledge violations can elicit an N400 effect relative to correct controls, not only in Chinese 48 , 68 but also in other languages using alphabets, such as English 49 , 69 , Dutch 50 , 74 and German 47 , 67 , 75 . These findings indicate that the difference between ideographic and alphabetic languages does not affect the neural processing of world knowledge integration in sentence comprehension.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension

Jiang

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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The effects of background speech or noise on visually based cognitive tasks has been widely investigated; however, little is known about how the brain works during such cognitive tasks when music, having a powerful function of evoking emotions, is used as the background sound. The present study used event-related potentials to examine the effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension and their modulation by musical arousal. Thirty-nine postgraduates judged the correctness of sentences about world knowledge without or with background music (high-arousal music and low-arousal music). The participants’ arousal levels were reported during the experiment. The results showed that the N400 effect, elicited by world knowledge violations versus correct controls, was significantly smaller for silence than those for high- and low-arousal music backgrounds, with no significant difference between the two musical backgrounds. This outcome might have occurred because the arousal levels of the participants were not affected by the high- and low-arousal music throughout the experiment. These findings suggest that background music affects neural responses during reading comprehension by increasing the difficulty of semantic integration, and thus extend the irrelevant sound effect to suggest that the neural processing of visually based cognitive tasks can also be affected by music.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 61%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension

Jiang

et al. 2020

Sci Rep

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“…The initial activation process is thought to be automatic, governed by memory-based associative operations, and very similar to that involved in the processing of affirmative sentences (Deutsch et al, 2006, 2009). By contrast, more controlled, rule-based processes are thought to intervene in the second step, inducing a change of the initial representation (Deutsch et al, 2009; Dudschig et al, 2019). Therefore, dealing with two opposing representations—the negated and the actual state of affairs—seems to demand to some extent conflict monitoring and selection of alternatives, followed by suppression or inhibition of the initial alternative (Dudschig and Kaup, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most prior behavioral and ERP studies have mainly focused on detecting the representational states associated with negation by measuring indexes of semantic processing such as the N400 component in world-knowledge or semantic violation sentences (e.g., Fischler et al, 1983; Nieuwland and Kuperberg, 2008; Dudschig et al, 2018, 2019) or reaction times in probe recognition tasks (MacDonald and Just, 1989; Kaup, 2001; Kaup and Zwaan, 2003), neglecting the conflict monitoring and inhibition processes that underlie the two-step process dynamics. By contrast, the time–frequency analysis of the EEG in the context of the dual-task paradigm we employed here may reveal an early operation of the inhibitory control mechanism that governs the transition from the initial to the final representation of the negated events (Dudschig et al, 2019) or prevents the representation of the negated situation. Interesting issues for further research are the extent to which the early inhibitory control process is automatically activated by negation operators, and the role that pragmatics (e.g., the pre-activation of negated meaning by the preceding context) plays in the initiation of conflict monitoring and the inhibition processes associated with negation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Brain Inhibitory Mechanisms Are Involved in the Processing of Sentential Negation, Regardless of Its Content. Evidence From EEG Theta and Beta Rhythms

et al. 2019

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The two-step process account of negation understanding posits an initial representation of the negated events, followed by a representation of the actual state of events. On the other hand, behavioral and neurophysiological studies provided evidence that linguistic negation suppresses or reduces the activation of the negated events, contributing to shift attention to the actual state of events. However, the specific mechanism of this suppression is poorly known. Recently, based on the brain organization principle of neural reuse ( Anderson, 2010 ), it has been proposed that understanding linguistic negation partially relies upon the neurophysiological mechanisms of response inhibition. Specifically, it was reported that negated action-related sentences modulate EEG signatures of response inhibition ( de Vega et al., 2016 ; Beltrán et al., 2018 ). In the current EEG study, we ponder whether the reusing of response inhibition processes by negation is constrained to action-related contents or consists of a more general-purpose mechanism. To this end, we employed the same dual-task paradigm as in our prior study—a Go/NoGo task embedded into a sentence comprehension task—but this time including both action and non-action sentences. The results confirmed that the increase of theta power elicited by NoGo trials was modulated by negative sentences, compared to their affirmative counterparts, and this polarity effect was statistically similar for both action- and non-action-related sentences. Thus, a general-purpose inhibitory control mechanism, rather than one specific for action language, is likely operating in the comprehension of sentential negation to produce the transition between alternative representations.

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“…The addition of a negation operator in a sentence results in a substantial modification of the sentence meaning through a reversal of its truth-value. Despite its frequent use in natural language, the presence of a negative marker seems to elicit additional processing resources during sentence comprehension, resulting in increased reading and reaction times, decreased response accuracy and differential event-related potential (ERP) responses when compared to affirmative sentences (Clark and Chase, 1972; Carpenter and Just, 1975; Fischler et al, 1983; Hasson and Glucksberg, 2006; Kaup et al, 2007; Luedtke et al, 2008; Dale and Duran, 2011; Wiswede et al, 2013; Dudschig et al, 2019). As a consequence, at least when presented in isolation, negative sentences have been argued to constitute an exception to fully incremental language comprehension (Carpenter and Just, 1975; Fischler et al, 1983; Kaup et al, 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study

2019

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Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

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Negation and the N400: investigating temporal aspects of negation integration using semantic and world-knowledge violations

Cited by 28 publications

References 39 publications

The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension

The effects of background music on neural responses during reading comprehension

Brain Inhibitory Mechanisms Are Involved in the Processing of Sentential Negation, Regardless of Its Content. Evidence From EEG Theta and Beta Rhythms

Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study

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