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.
2
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 of this experiment suggest that 1,500 ms after reading a sentence, participants based their responses on a situation model in which present but not absent properties are represented and therefore highly accessible. Participants responded significantly faster to a probe word when the corresponding color was present in the described situation than when it was absent. The fact that the accessibility of the color terms was not influenced by the polarity of the phrases they were mentioned in suggests that a linguistic representation of the text did not play a significant role in the participants’ response processes.
48
76