Spychalska Maria, Haase Viviana, Werning Markus
Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Science, Institute of Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany; Neurobiology of Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Science, Institute of Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Neuropsychologia. 2025 Sep 9;216:109167. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2025.109167. Epub 2025 May 29.
Studies on negation processing frequently report a polarity-by-truth interaction: False affirmative sentences usually show longer response times and larger N400 amplitudes compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas for negative sentences the effect of truth-value is typically reversed. This interaction has repeatedly been linked to factors such as lexical associations, predictability, or to the need of constructing two subsequent mental representations during the comprehension of negative sentences. In a series of ERP experiments using a picture-sentence verification paradigm, we investigated how sentence polarity, truth-value and predictability interact during sentence processing. Predictability was manipulated by varying the number of alternative sentence continuations provided by the context, similarly for both sentence polarities. For both affirmative and negative sentences, true sentences elicited reduced N400 amplitudes in strongly constraining contexts-where a specific continuation was highly predictable-compared to weakly constraining contexts, where no clear prediction could be made. For false sentences, the effect of context was reversed for both sentence polarities. Crucially, the effect of Truth was dependent on predictability rather than sentence polarity: Both affirmative and negative sentences showed the same direction of the effect of Truth, namely, larger N400s for false rather than true sentences in the strongly constraining context, and the opposite pattern in the weakly constraining context, although the size of these effects differed across the two polarities. In addition, we observe a long-lasting positivity effect for negation, in both context conditions, for both truth-values and across all five experiments. We interpret this effect as reflecting inhibitory mechanisms recruited during negation processing.
与真肯定句相比，假肯定句通常表现出更长的反应时间和更大的N400波幅，而对于否定句，真值的影响通常是相反的。这种交互作用一再与词汇联想、可预测性等因素相关联，或者与在理解否定句时构建两个后续心理表征的需求有关。在一系列使用图片-句子验证范式的ERP实验中，我们研究了句子极性、真值和可预测性在句子加工过程中是如何相互作用的。通过改变语境提供的替代句子延续的数量来操纵可预测性，两种句子极性的情况类似。对于肯定句和否定句，与弱约束语境（无法做出明确预测）相比，在强约束语境（特定延续高度可预测）中，真句子引发的N400波幅降低。对于假句子，两种句子极性的语境效应都是相反的。关键的是，真值的效应取决于可预测性而非句子极性：肯定句和否定句都显示出真值效应的相同方向，即在强约束语境中，假句子比真句子引发更大的N400波幅，而在弱约束语境中则呈现相反的模式，尽管这两种极性的效应大小有所不同。此外，在所有五种实验中，在两种语境条件下，对于两种真值情况，我们都观察到了一种针对否定的持久正性效应。我们将这种效应解释为反映了否定加工过程中招募的抑制机制。
