Universität zu Köln

Haase, Viviana, Spychalska, Maria and Werning, Markus ORCID: 0000-0001-7303-4154 (2019). Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study. Front. Psychol., 10. LAUSANNE: FRONTIERS MEDIA SA. ISSN 1664-1078

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Abstract

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semanticallymismatching 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.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Haase, Viviana UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Spychalska, Maria UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Werning, Markus UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0001-7303-4154 UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-130684
DOI:	10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02184
Journal or Publication Title:	Front. Psychol.
Volume:	10
Date:	2019
Publisher:	FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
Place of Publication:	LAUSANNE
ISSN:	1664-1078
Language:	English
Faculty:	Unspecified
Divisions:	Unspecified
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language PREDICT UPCOMING WORDS; BRAIN POTENTIALS; SEMANTIC MEMORY; EYE-MOVEMENTS; WRAP-UP; LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION; CONTEXT USE; INFORMATION; IMPACT; TRUTH Multiple languages Psychology, Multidisciplinary Multiple languages
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/13068