Abstract:

Affirmation and negation are semantic and grammatical categories present in virtually all languages. Many different theories have been proposed to explain the processing mechanism of negation. The schema-plus-tag model and the two-step simulation hypothesis have been accepted by many researchers. However, neither of these hypotheses cannot explain the processing mechanism of isolated negative sentences with uncertain states, such as the skirt is not red. In this study, we proposed anchor-based activation and satisfaction constrained model, to solve this problem. The sentence-verification paradigm was adopted in three experiments to explore the processing mechanism of negated sentences with uncertain states. In these experiments, participants were presented with affirmative or negative sentences with target objects, such as the skirt is/isn’t red. After reading the sentences with a delay condition of either 250ms, 750ms, or 1500ms, pictures were presented instantly. The task of participants was to verify whether the objects in the pictures appeared in the previous sentences. In these experiments, we designed three kinds of probing pictures. The first kind was “N”, which depicted the negated state of affairs of negated sentences, such as a red skirt for the sentence The skirt is not red; the second kind was “×+N”, which depicted the actual state of affairs of negated sentences, such as a red skirt plus negated marker (×); the last kind was “A”, which depicted one of the alternative states of affairs of negated sentences, such as a blue skirt. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that both of the data patterns of the affirmative and negated sentences were “N = ×+ N, ×+ N

Key words: negatives with uncertain state, isolated negative sentences, two-step simulation hypothesis, anchor-based activation and satisfaction constrained model