{"pk":32281,"title":"The processing of negatives during discourse comprehension","subtitle":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the eflfects of negation in discourse comprehension. The paper is based on the finding by Mac-Donald and Just (1989) that after reading sentences such as <i>Elizabeth bakes some bread but no cookies</i> subjects are faster to respond to the probe <i>bread</i> than to the probe <i>cookies</i>. The question arises whether this differential availability of the relevant concepts is due to negation, or whether it reflects the fact that a bread is present in the described situation, whereas cookies are not. In order to decide between these alternatives two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1 negated entities that are absent from the described situation were compared with non-negated entities that are present, whereas in Experiment 2 negated entities that are present in the situation were compared with non-negated entities that are absent. The results of the two experiments indicate that both factors, namely 'negation' and 'absence from situation', affect the availability of concepts during discourse processing.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Long Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4tc558j0","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Barbara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kaup","name_suffix":"","institution":"Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"1997-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/32281/galley/23346/download/"}]}