title: Experiential simulations of negated text information.
abstract: We investigated the question of whether comprehenders mentally simulate a described situation even when this situation is explicitly negated in the sentence. In two experiments, participants read negative sentences such as There was no eagle in the sky, and subsequently responded to pictures of mentioned entities in the context of a recognition task. Participants' responses following negative sentences were faster when the depicted entity matched rather than mismatched the negated situation. These results suggest that comprehenders simulate the negated situation when processing a negated sentence. The results thereby provide further support for the experiential-simulations view of language comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Berlin University of Technology, Berlin, Germany. barbara.kaup@tu-berlin.de
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Kaup
authors.forename: Richard H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Yaxley
authors.forename: Carol J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Madden
authors.forename: Rolf A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Zwaan
authors.forename: Jana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lüdtke
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011589:Psychology, Experimental / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011930:Reaction Time