Context effects on the spontaneous production of negation

Abstract

There has been a substantial amount of research that has examined how context affects people's understanding of negation. Many authors argue that negation is more plausible or natural in some contexts than in others. For these authors, it is reasonable to negate a proposition only when it is presupposed. However, this assumption has been indirectly inferred from comprehension studies. None of them checked if the frequency of the spontaneous use of negation depends on the context. In this paper we present two experiments on this topic. The participants read stories where a sentence is false; and were asked to produce a sentence that could be true. In the first experiment they produced more negations from multiple than from bipolar contexts (e.g., when the false sentence was “ the car was red ” as compared to “ the car was big ”). In the second experiment the context was logically dichotomized by adding disjunctions. In this case, incongruent contexts enhanced the use of negation. The results seem to support the idea that when there is a clear alternative, negation is seldom spontaneously produced even if it denies a presupposition.