Why we simulate negated information: A dynamic pragmatic account

Abstract

A well-established finding in the simulation literature is that participants simulate the positive argument of negation soon after reading a negative sentence, prior to simulating a scene consistent with the negated sentence (Kaup, Lüdtke, & Zwaan, 2006; Kaup, Yaxley, Madden, Zwaan, & Lüdtke, 2007). One interpretation of this finding is that negation requires two steps to process: first represent what is being negated then “reject” that in favour of a representation of a negation-consistent state of affairs (Kaup et al., 2007). In this paper we argue that this finding with negative sentences could be a by-product of the dynamic way that language is interpreted relative to a common ground and not the way that negation is represented. We present a study based on Kaup et al. (2007) that tests the competing accounts. Our results suggest that some negative sentences are not processed in two steps, but provide support for the alternative, dynamic account.

Keywords:

• Negation
• Language comprehension
• Simulation
• Pragmatics

This work was carried out with the support of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Ref: AH/E002358/1) and from the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (Oslo), “Linguistic Agency” project. Particular thanks are due to Nathan Klinedinst for productive discussion about our items and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this work.

Notes

¹Strength of association is reported in terms of partial eta-squared (η² _p).

²We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

³Our pragmatic account differs from that proposed in Mayo, Schul, and Burnstein (2004), who report interference from the positive argument of negation in so-called unipolar items (“The shirt is not red”) but not in bipolar cases (“The door is not closed”). Mayo et al. propose that two models apply to the two different classes of negation, but this does not predict the effects we report here since our items are the same across the cleft and noncleft conditions.