Putting context into context: sources of context and a proposed mechanism for linguistic negation

ABSTRACT

Linguistic negation is often underspecified. The eagle is not in the sky does not specify a concrete meaning. For this reason, context is crucial, and can substantially mediate the meaning of a negated sentence. A core issue in the area of sentence processing and incorporation of context, is what information constitutes context, and how is it processed in the moment. The first study demonstrates the ambiguity of certain negated sentences without sufficient context, and a mousetracking study revealed greater deviations toward a lure during affirmative sentence processing compared to negated sentence processing. This counterintuitive result is predicted by a model of referent activation and motor responses in which referents are treated independently, compared to a model where affirmative and negated referents compete with one another. These findings are presented in a framework processing context via information from stored lexical-semantic representations (memory-mediated) or concurrent perceptual information (perceptually-mediated).

KEYWORDS:

• Language comprehension
• negation
• mousetracking
• sentence processing
• semantics
• computational model

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Bob McMurray, Barry Devereux, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this manuscript. Thank you to Michael Spivey for use of lab equipment necessary to run this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stephanie Huette http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5693-7458

Additional information

Funding

This work was in part supported by a University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship to Huette.