The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

Abstract

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.