Experiential simulations of negated text information

Abstract

We investigated the question of whether comprehenders mentally simulate a described situation even when this situation is explicitly negated in the sentence. In two experiments, participants read negative sentences such as There was no eagle in the sky, and subsequently responded to pictures of mentioned entities in the context of a recognition task. Participants' responses following negative sentences were faster when the depicted entity matched rather than mismatched the negated situation. These results suggest that comprehenders simulate the negated situation when processing a negated sentence. The results thereby provide further support for the experiential-simulations view of language comprehension.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant KA 1389/2–1 to B. Kaup (German Research Foundation), and Grant MH-63972 to Rolf A. Zwaan (NIMH).

Notes

¹ It should be noted that the particular task that is being used in the experiments does not in any way highlight shape properties. First, shape is not an explicitly mentioned property in any of the sentences. Rather it is being implicitly manipulated by manipulating the location of the objects. Second, the shape of the target entity is completely irrelevant for the task. Participants are to decide whether or not the depicted object had been mentioned in the sentence. Thus, irrespective of the shape of the target entity, the correct response is always “yes” in experimental trials. Taken together, the fact that comprehenders seem to represent the shape of the target objects (in the negated situation) cannot be attributed to the task highlighting the importance of shape attributes. What is conceivable in principle is that the picture recognition task constitutes a particularly favourable condition for simulation effects in the sense that comprehenders tend to simulate the described situation just because they know that later they will possibly see a picture of the described scene. However, the literature on language comprehension to date includes a large number of studies demonstrating simulation effects, and only a small amount of these employ picture-recognition or picture-naming tasks. Thus, simulation effects do not seem to depend on the visual properties of this task. We therefore feel safe in assuming that the results reported in the present article are also not dependent on the particular choice of task.

² We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this explanation.