Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2024 Jan;77(1):90-110. doi: 10.1177/17470218231158109. Epub 2023 Apr 3.
Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments () in combination with four potential continuations: (a plausible word), (a weak world knowledge violating word), (a severe world knowledge violating word), and (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.
事件的似真性促进了肯定句的处理，但对于它如何影响否定句却知之甚少。在六个行为实验中，我们研究了否定对不同事件似真性的句子延续选择的影响。在一个四选一的完形填空任务中，参与者看到了肯定和否定的句子片段（），并与四个潜在的延续：（一个似真的词），（一个违背世界知识的弱词），（一个严重违背世界知识的词），和（一个导致语义违反的词）。在所有实验中，在肯定句和否定句中，似真词都是高度首选的。实验 2 复制了实验 1，同时排除了实验 1 中否定缺乏效果的可能性是由于参与者没有完全处理否定。实验 3 表明，观察到的似真性效应可以推广到其他方面的形式（）。实验 4 排除了选择主要由词汇联想驱动的可能性，并进一步表明了信息量的作用。实验 5 复制了实验 4，并根据否定句表达对似真的肯定事件的否认，强化了一般模式。实验 6 提供了证据表明，信息量可能是驱动否定句中选择模式的原因。总之，这些发现表明，在肯定句中选择后续内容是为了使事件的似真性最大化，而在否定句中则否认该事件。观察到的似真性效应似乎不受事件的内部表示的调节，但它们可以通过句子的预期信息量的变化来调节。
