Talk by XPrag.de Junior Fellow Maria Spychalska at ESPP 2016

XPrag.de Junior Fellow Maria Spychalska from project “InfoPer” will give a talk together with Viviana Haase, Jarmo Kontinen and Markus Werning at the 24th annual meeting of the European Society of Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP 2016), taking place in St Andrews, Scotland from August 10th – 13th 2016.
They will talk on “Processing affirmation and negation in contexts with unique or multiple alternatives”.

Abstract:
Negative sentences have been claimed to be more complex and therefore harder to process than affirmative ones. This observation raises the question of how negated concepts are represented and how negation is integrated into the sentence meaning. In our EEG – experiment we addressed the question of whether the processing of affirmation and negation is facilitated in such cases where the context offers a unique referent relative to those cases where the context offers multiple referents. We used a sentence – picture – verification paradigm and measured the event-related potentials to answer this question.
Our results show that it is harder to process sentences in contexts with multiple alternatives than those occurring in contexts with a unique referent, independently of the polarity of the sentence. Additionally, we observed a sustained positivity effect for the negative compared to the affirmative conditions, which indicates a possible reanalysis mechanisms related to the processing of negation.