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

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.