Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
Lab Neuroscience & Humanities, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
Psychol Res. 2024 Jun;88(4):1169-1181. doi: 10.1007/s00426-024-01941-0. Epub 2024 Mar 14.
Several studies demonstrated that explicit forms of negation processing (e.g., "I don't know") recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms. However, whether this is also true for implicit negation, in which the negative meaning is implicated but not explicitly lexicalized in the sentence (e.g., "I ignore"), has never been studied before. Two Go/No-Go studies, which differed only for the time-windows to respond to the Go stimulus, were carried out. In each, participants (N = 86 in experiment 1; N = 87 in experiment 2) respond to coloured circle while reading task-irrelevant affirmative, explicit negative and implicit negative sentences. We aimed to investigate whether: (i) the processing of implicit negations recruits inhibitory mechanisms; (ii) these inhibitory resources are differently modulated by implicit and explicit negations. Results show that implicit negative sentences recruit the inhibitory resources more strongly when compared to explicit ones, probably due to their inferential nature, likely requiring deeper processing of the negative meaning. Implicit and inferential meaning (i.e., pragmatic information) are grounded too in the same mechanisms that integrate action with perception. Such findings provide further evidence to the embodied account of language, showing that even abstract aspects, like implicit negation, are grounded in the sensory-motor system, by means of functional link between language and motor activity.
几项研究表明，明确的否定处理形式（例如，“我不知道”）会招募运动抑制机制。然而，对于隐含否定（即句子中暗示否定含义但未明确用词汇表达的否定，例如“我忽略”）是否也是如此，以前从未进行过研究。进行了两项 Go/No-Go 研究，这些研究仅在响应 Go 刺激的时间窗口上有所不同。在每个研究中，参与者（实验 1 中为 86 人；实验 2 中为 87 人）在阅读与任务无关的肯定、明确否定和隐含否定句子的同时对彩色圆圈做出反应。我们旨在调查以下问题：（i）隐含否定的处理是否会招募抑制机制；（ii）这些抑制资源是否会因隐含否定和明确否定而有所不同地调节。结果表明，与明确否定相比，隐含否定句在处理时会更强烈地招募抑制资源，这可能是由于它们的推理性质，可能需要对否定意义进行更深入的处理。隐含和推理意义（即语用信息）也扎根于相同的机制中，这些机制将动作与感知整合在一起。这些发现为语言的具身理论提供了进一步的证据，表明即使是像隐含否定这样的抽象方面，也扎根于感觉运动系统中，通过语言和运动活动之间的功能联系。
