Context Effects when Reading Negative and Affirmative Sentences

Abstract

In two experiments, participants were presented with narratives in which a target entity (e.g., water) was introduced.The final sentences affirmed or negated that a particular property held for the target entity (e.g., The water was (not) warm).The linguistic context was manipulated.In Experiment 1, reading times for the negative target sentences (but not those for the affirmative ones) were affected by the context manipulation, with shorter reading times in conditions in which the negated proposition had been explicitly mentioned in the prior text.Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar facilitation effect with respect to inferred propositions.The results of the two experiments support pragmatic considerations concerning the context dependency of the processing difficulty associated with negative sentences.