Negation interacts with motivational direction in understanding action sentences

What is it about?

Linguistic negation acts by inhibiting the representation of information under its scope, often leading to the representation of positive alternative states of affairs. Motivational direction refers to approach/avoidance intentionality in our interactions with environmental stimuli expressed by means of verbs (e.g., “accept” vs “reject”). We consider it plausible that negation interacts with direction to represent the true motivation of the protagonist in sentence understanding (e.g., if an approach action is negated it is represented as avoidance). In the first study, we examine this interaction offline by asking participants to judge approach or avoidance meaning of affirmative (e.g., “he/she included/excluded meat”) and negative sentences (“he/she did not include/exclude meat”). Results support that negation reversed participants’ interpretation of sentence motivational direction. In a further study, we carried out two probe recognition experiments to examine the interaction during sentence comprehension; in both, the critical probe was the word referring to the target of the action (e.g., “meat”). In the first experiment, participants had to recognize the probe word presented 1500 milliseconds after sentence offset, while for the second one, the delay was 500 milliseconds. Results showed that at 1500 ms, target recognition took significantly more time for negated avoidance sentences than for the other conditions. Therefore, representing negated avoidance sentences seems to imply more complex processing, as avoidance verbs would be implicitly negative. By contrast, at the 500 ms delay, negation impaired target recognition for both approach and avoidance sentences, suggesting an unspecific inhibitory effect of negation at that sentence processing stage. Implication of these results for both research on negation and in action understanding are discussed.

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Why is it important?

This study presents some relevant contributions to research into the role of negation in the comprehension of action sentences. On the one hand, it examines the interaction of a category of verbal actions characterized by having a motivational direction with sentential negation. Examination of this interaction seems opportune as approach and avoidance present cognitive communalities with affirmation and negation. In addition, proposals about how approach and avoidance are represented, and how negation affects representation of alternatives in this type of actions seem theoretically relevant and could have an impact on social cognition and communication research. In particular, this could be important in terms of social navigation by representing ourselves and communicating to others our preferences and aversion towards environmental stimuli either in an affirmative or a negative way.

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