Kaup, B., & Zwaan, R. A. (2003). Effects of negation and situational presence on the accessibility of text information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29(3), 439-446.

Kaup, B.;Zwaan, R.

2003

Kaup, B., & Zwaan, R. A. (2003). Effects of negation and situational presence on the accessibility of text information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29(3), 439-446.

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In 2 experiments, participants read narratives containing a color term that was mentioned either within the scope of an explicit negative or not, and with the described situation being such that the color was either present or not. Accessibility of the color term was measured by means of a probe-recognition task either 500 ms (Experiment 1) or 1,500 ms (Experiment 2) after participants read the sentence mentioning color. After the 500-ms delay, the accessibility of the color term was influenced by the structure of the sentence. After the 1,500-ms delay, the accessibility was influenced by the content of the described situation. These results are consistent with the view that comprehenders construct a linguistic representation of the text as well as a situation model in which only present properties are represented. An alternative account, according to which comprehenders only construct a perceptual simulation of the described situation, is discussed.

The results suggest that 500 ms after an individual reads a sentence, a concept’s accessibility depends on the linguistic structure of the phrase it was mentioned in. Concepts mentioned in a negative phrase were less accessible than concepts mentioned in an affirmative phrase. This finding supports the hypothesis that participants construct a linguistic representation of the sentence in which negation functions as an accessibility-reducing mechanism. Whether this representation is indeed a propositional representation of the sentence meaning or another kind of linguistic representation in which negation is explicitly represented (e.g., a surface-level representation) is unclear. The results do not indicate that participants also had available a situation model of the aspects described in the target sentence.

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