Kaup, B. (2001). Negation and its impact on the accessibility of text information. Memory & Cognition, 29(7), 960-967.

Kaup, B.

2001

Kaup, B. (2001). Negation and its impact on the accessibility of text information. Memory & Cognition, 29(7), 960-967.

studie 2

Prior experiments have shown that sentences such as (1) lead to a reduced accessibility of the concept mentioned in the negated phrase, whereas sentences such as (2) do not. In the present article, two explanations for this result are investigated. According to situation model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), the reason is that the entity mentioned within the negated phrase in (2) is not absent from the described situation. According to discourse representation theory (Kamp, 1981), in contrast, the negation operator in (2) does not reduce the accessibility of the negated concept, because the corresponding discourse referent is not introduced but merely referred to within the operator's scope. In two experiments, participants were presented with narrative texts including negation sentences that either introduced or referred to entities, and that either described a situation in which only the nonnegated or only the negated entity was present. The accessibility of the relevant concepts was measured by means of a probe recognition task. The results support the situation models explanation.

Participants responded significantly faster with creation passages than with destruction passages. Nonnegated nouns were responded to significantly faster than negated nouns.

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