Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstraße 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Mem Cognit. 2023 Nov;51(8):1807-1818. doi: 10.3758/s13421-023-01434-2. Epub 2023 Jul 5.
Negation is often used to contradict or correct (e.g. There is no dog here.). While rejecting some state of affairs that is presumed to hold for the recipient (e.g. There is a dog here.), the speaker might implicitly suggest a set of plausible alternatives (e.g. There is a wolf instead.). Prior work indicates that alternatives are highly relevant to the comprehension of sentences involving focus: in priming studies, listeners infer plausible alternatives to focused items even when they are not contextually available. So far it is unclear whether negation similarly activates an automatic search for plausible alternatives. The current study was designed to investigate this question, by looking at the activation levels of nouns after negative and affirmative sentences. In a series of priming experiments, subjects were presented with negative and affirmative sentences (e.g. There is an/no apple.), followed by a lexical decision task with targets including plausible alternatives (e.g. pear), as well as semantically related but implausible alternatives (e.g. seed). An interaction of Sentence Polarity and Prime-Target Relation was expected, with negation facilitating responses to plausible alternatives. Results of the first experiment were numerically in line with the hypothesis but the interaction just missed significance level. A post hoc analysis revealed the expected significant interaction. Possible roles of sentential context and goodness of alternatives are discussed. A further experiment confirms that the goodness of alternatives is in fact critical in modulating the effect.
否定词常用来反驳或纠正（例如：这里没有狗。）。虽然否定了被认为适用于受话者的某种状态（例如：这里有一只狗。），说话者可能会含蓄地暗示一组合理的替代方案（例如：这里有一只狼。）。先前的研究表明，替代方案与涉及焦点的句子理解高度相关：在启动研究中，即使在没有上下文的情况下，听众也会推断出聚焦项目的合理替代方案。到目前为止，还不清楚否定是否同样会自动搜索合理的替代方案。本研究旨在通过研究否定句和肯定句后名词的激活水平来探讨这个问题。在一系列启动实验中，受试者首先看到否定句和肯定句（例如：有/没有苹果。），然后进行词汇判断任务，目标包括合理的替代方案（例如：梨），以及语义相关但不合理的替代方案（例如：种子）。预计会出现句子极性和先行词-目标关系的交互作用，否定会促进对合理替代方案的反应。第一个实验的结果在数值上与假设一致，但交互作用刚好没有达到显著水平。事后分析显示出预期的显著交互作用。句子语境和替代方案的合理性的可能作用将被讨论。进一步的实验证实，替代方案的合理性确实是调节这种效应的关键。
