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The Role of the Negated Information in Processing Negation: A Visual World Study.

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Abstract

This paper reports the results of a visual world study that explored the processing of sentential negation by Italian adults. To fulfill this aim, we assessed the perceptual prominence of the negated information (that is, the propositional content in the scope of negation). Specifically, we employed an identification task in a visual world set-up in which participants had to listen to affirmative and negative sentences (e.g., Aladdin [is/is not] closing the door…) while looking at visual scenes with the number of pictures matching the negated content varying from one to three. Negation processing was investigated across different propositional and perceptual dimensions by including three types of items (cartoons, black and white, and coloured shapes). We found that i) participants were always slower in target identification with negative sentences vs. their affirmative counterparts; ii) the perceptual prominence of the negated information reduced this processing penalty. These results support the idea that the representation of the negated information plays an active role in negative sentence comprehension, in compliance with two-step-based accounts of negation processing. Nonetheless, the computation of sentential negation displays some degree of flexibility and is in part modulated by the visual and linguistic information provided.

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  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Cognition
  • Cognitive Science
  • Inhibition
  • Language Processing
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Notes

  1. Processing costs are generally evaluated in terms of accuracy (i.e., correctness in performing the task) and reaction times (participant’s response latency).

  2. It represents the ‘argument’ of negation (following Tian et al.’s (2010) terminology), intended as the semantic information occurring under its scope, and it is in all respects mentioned, i.e., explicitly expressed in the sentences.

  3. This and the subsequent values mentioned throughout the section represent the percentage of target fixations, where 0.06 corresponds to 6%.

  4. The main effect of target number was significant in all item type conditions (cartoons: β = 0.15, t = 16.58, p <.001; black and white shapes: β = 0.15, t = 13.74, p <.001; coloured shapes: β = 0.04, t = 2.84, p = < 0.01) and was due to the adopted experimental design (i.e., different base probability of target fixation across the three target conditions).

  5. A series of post-hoc power analyses were conducted using G*Power (Faul et al., 2007) to assess the achieved statistical power for the LMMs (R2 deviation from zero) for the three item types (given the total sample size = 62; number of predictors = 3; critical F-value = 2.76). For cartoons (f² = 0.249), the power to detect obtained effects at the alpha level of 0.05 was 0.91. For black and white shapes (f² = 0.212), the power to detect obtained effects at the alpha level of 0.05 was 0.85. For coloured shapes (f² = 0.166), the power to detect obtained effects at the alpha level of 0.05 was 0.74. These analyses indicate sufficient power for detecting medium to large effects for cartoon and black and white shapes, while the analysis for coloured shapes reflects a slightly lower power, reducing sensitivity to smaller effects.

  6. For ease of reading, we report the values of the GLMM conducted on the first significant 50ms-bin.

  7. It is worth asking whether the explanation we have provided for this effect could be given in different terms, which are unrelated to the role of the negated information itself. For instance, it could be that in negative trials involving only one mentioned argument (and three targets)– which revealed a maximum penalty for negation–, the fact that the negated information only matched a single picture in the visual display could have drawn the listeners’ attention to a greater extent compared to other conditions involving more than one mentioned argument. That is, under this hypothesis, the uniqueness of the mentioned argument, rather than its greater numerosity, was a more decisive factor in determining its visual prominence. While this explanation cannot be ruled out a priori for the conditions with three targets and one mentioned argument, it would fail to explain the gradual reduction of penalty as well as the difference between the negative conditions with two vs. one target(s). This is so because in both these conditions there was never a unique mentioned argument, and it is very unlikely that two quadrants displaying the same character were more salient than three.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Denis Delfitto, Maria Vender, and Hedde Zeijlstra for their valuable feedback and discussions on earlier versions of this work. We are also grateful for the feedback received when the data from this study were presented at the AMLaP 2019 conference. Finally, we thank all the participants who took part in the study.

Funding

No funds, grants, or other support was received.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cultures and Civilizations, University of Verona, Viale dell’Università 4, Verona, 37129, Italy

    Marta Tagliani & Chiara Melloni

  2. Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies (COSPECS), University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Daniele Panizza

Contributions

All authors equally contributed to the writing of the paper and to designing the experiment. A1 ran the participants. A2 and A1 prepared the experimental material, implemented the experiment, and analysed the data.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marta Tagliani.

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Ethical Approval

Ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee at University of Verona (Ref No: 2020_04). The study was conducted in accordance with the standards specified in the 2013 Declaration of Helsinki.

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Permission to conduct the experiment for the purposes of this research was obtained by all participants, who were fully informed about the purposes of this research and how their responses would be used and stored. Please see below for the consent form template translated to English.

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Tagliani, M., Panizza, D. & Melloni, C. The Role of the Negated Information in Processing Negation: A Visual World Study.. J Psycholinguist Res 54, 43 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-025-10161-5

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  • DOI  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-025-10161-5

Keywords

  • Negation
  • Sentence processing
  • Visual world paradigm

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