Negated concepts interfere with anaphor resolution

Abstract

Across three experiments, we studied whether the mental representations of negated concepts are suppressed. In two reading-time experiments, we tested whether the presence of a negated nonreferent distractor (e.g., Justin bought a mango but not an apple. He ate the fruit. ) interfered with the process of anaphor resolution. We found evidence that highly-typical category exemplars (e.g., apple ) in the negated nonreferent role interfere with anaphor comprehension; evidence regarding less-typical category exemplars was mixed. In a third experiment, participants read brief passages like those from the prior experiments and their memory for the category exemplars was tested in a surprise cued-recall task. Once again, we found evidence that negated nonreferents are considered during anaphor resolution. These results are inconsistent with a theoretical perspective that posits that negation of a concept obligatorily leads to suppression of that concept. Instead, we argue that the comprehension of negation will be dictated by its pragmatic role.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.