| It has been shown that negation is used with different functions in natural language:in order to explicitly express denial and opposition, in order to contradict a common expectation or belief held by the receiver, in order to convey understatement or irony, or as a modifier of degree as in "the water is not hot". In recent years, the processing of negative sentence comprehension has gradually become a hot topic in psychological research with the progress of research methods and technique.The research on the perceptual representation of negative sentence is one of the most important problems in language comprehension and representation. In summary, there are two models regarding the processing of negation:the one-step model and the two-step model. The two-step model hypothesis that the processing of negative sentence involves a two-step way. Specifically, understanding a negative sentence (e.g., the door is not open) involves two steps. The first step concerns the representation of the negated state of affairs (the door is open) and the second step is the creation of the actual state of affairs (the door is closed). Furthermore, strong evidence for the two-step model is mainly provided by a series of studies that the time delay between negation and the other stimulus has an important impact on negation processing. In contrast, the one-step model hypothesizes that the actual state of affairs could easily be achieved without representing the negated state of affairs, but only confine to the contradictory negation. The study that demonstrated negation processing depends on types of negation provides the strong evidence for the one-step model. In summary, there is no consensus regarding the processing of negative sentences. The two-step model places the emphasis on the time delay, whereas the one-step model seems to underline types of negation.There is no doubt that negation is part of our daily language and communication. Negation as a very important part of our daily life, often been used to express logical negation, attitude(don’t like), emotional (hate) and will (against).Moreover, the linguistics research show that one of the main functions of negation is refused to accept, or reject commitment in daily communication. Previous studies mainly focus on the general processing diffculity of negation, negation and truth value, the accessibility of negation, the automaticity of the cognitive process of negation. But at present, no study involves the emotional effect of negation was conducted.In the present study, based on the previous studies, several experiments were conducted as the extension of basic processing of negation. The aim of study1was to clarify whether the processing of contradictory negations involves a two-step or a one-step operation. In other words, we aimed to explore whether the negated state of affairs was represented or not when processing contradictory negations. In addition, another aim of study1was to test and verify whether the negated state of affairs was represented when processing non-contradictory negation.To sum up, by exploring the effects of types of negation (contradictory and non-contradictory) and time delays (short and long) on the processing of negative sentences in a sentence-picture-verification task, this study aimed to examine whether the negated state of affairs was represented or not when processing negative sentences. The aim of the study2was to explore the emotional effects of negation by using the affective priming paradigm:Bona Fide Pipeline (BFP) and Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP).In the study1, we employed the classic sentence-picture verification task. Participants were presented affirmative or negative sentences with contradictory and non-contradictory predicates. Subsequently a picture appeared, and participants were asked to judge whether the picture matched the sentence. Study1has two main findings:First, for contradictory negation, the actual state of affairs could be easily achieved regardless of the time delay, indicated most clearly by comparing the time needed to process the true sentence and the false sentence. Second, the negated state of affairs of non-contradictory negation could be represented, reflected through the faster response for the false sentence than for the true sentence. These findings indicated that the negated state of affairs was not always represented when processing negation. The processing of negation was influenced by the types of negation.In the study2, a Bona Fide Pipeline (BFP) was adopted in the experiment lto investigate the priming effects of affirmed and negated version. Pairs of words (e.g.. no comment) were first presented as the prime stimuli, followed by positive or negative target words. Participants were told that they would see white-colored word pairs followed by positive or negative yellow-colored single words. Their task was to evaluate the yellow single word as positive or negative as quickly and as accurately as possible. The experiment results showed that:(1)The main effect of prime was not significant, that is, there is no priming effects of affirmed and negated version.(2) The main effect of target was significant, the RTs of positive words was faster than negative words. In addition, the two-way interaction of prime and valence was not significant. The Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) was used in experiment2. Pairs of words (e.g., no comment) were first presented as the prime stimuli, followed by neutral stimuli (Tibetan characters) as the target words. The task was to evaluate the neutral stimuli as positive or negative. The results revealed that:The main effect of prime was significant. Specifically, negative words had a more negative rate than affirmative words. The results of experiment2might showed that, negation had negative emotional effect to some extent.In summary, we found that:(1) For contradictory negation, only the actual state of affairs rather than the negated state of affairs was represented.(2)The negated state of affairs of non-contradictory negation was clearly represented. In summary, the processing of negative sentences depended on types of negation and the negated state of affairs was not always represented unconditionally (3) When the target stimuli was neutral, the negative words as the prime stimuli had a more negative rate than affirmative words, which might suggested that negation had negative emotional effect. |
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